Last week, Sen. John Cornyn proposed a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. The proposal failed, but we expect it to succeed when Cornyn tries again. And we hope he will.
Juneteenth remembers June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had abolished slavery more than two years earlier.
There is much public support for this measure. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia already recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. Texas was the first to do so in 1980. The idea has wide support among lawmakers too. Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston has proposed a similar measure in the House, where more than 150 members have signed on as co-sponsors. Cornyn teamed with Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, to write the bill, and requested its adoption on July 22 by unanimous consent in the Senate.
The unanimous consent piece was what got it in trouble.
That procedure allows the Senate to move more quickly than the process used to bring many bills to the floor. It’s a shortcut, a way to fast-track something that should be uncontroversial. But it also means that one senator’s dissent can prevent the bill’s passage. In this case, the dissenter was Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson acknowledged the importance of Juneteenth but objected to the cost of adding a paid holiday for federal workers. To his credit, Johnson proposed swapping Juneteenth for Columbus Day, a federal holiday that has come under fire in recent years.
Recognizing Juneteenth is the right thing to do, and we support it. But in our current political climate, we’re not surprised that even something so patently commendable stirs up snark. Some Democrats questioned Cornyn’s motives. Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, Texas, went so far as to suggest that Cornyn and Johnson were in cahoots to introduce but spike the measure.
It is true that both Cornyn and Markey face formidable challenges to reelection. Neither is blind to the political points that might be scored from authoring such a bill in an election year and during sustained public outcry over racial injustice. But excavating the mysteries of a politician’s motives is a fool’s errand that does nothing to promote sound public policy. We’ll leave the motive-judgment to Veasey. For our part, we’ll simply point out that Cornyn doesn’t have to take no for an answer. He can and should reintroduce the bill. It didn’t pass with unanimous consent, so Cornyn should now go through the process of shepherding his proposal to the Senate floor for a vote where, we’re confident, it will be adopted.
Roadblocks of this sort are not unusual in legislative bodies. After all, there’s a reason for the cliche that equates difficult, tedious processes with acts of Congress. And we’ll note the fact that this is a delay in the adoption of a holiday that, itself, marks the delivery of long-delayed news. The right thing to do now is push it forward again. It’ll pass if it comes to a vote.
— The Dallas Morning News
