Recently, the House roundly rejected a proposed amendment to a funding bill from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have given broad protections to monuments on federal lands… with an eye towards shielding monuments to figures like Confederate leaders.
The amendment, as summarized on Congress.gov, would have blocked certain federal “funds from being used to remove any monument on land under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior.” Greene spoke on the House floor in defense of this plan, specifically tying her ambitions to, among other factors, the destruction of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee that had stood in Virginia. Absurdly, she characterized recent historical trends exemplified by the statue’s destruction as some kind of Communist attempt to erase or otherwise push out history. However, it remains just flatly without reasonable basis to characterize removing a statue as some kind of anti-American fight against history.
In the House, 191 members voted for Greene’s proposal, while 227 members were in opposition. (Republicans in general have been running with that idea of preserving U.S. statues for some time now.) Greene was furious about the Republican defections.
“After seeing what the Pro-Hamas protesters did to monuments last night, too bad Republicans voted with Democrats against my amendment to protect monuments on federal lands,” Greene complained. While there have been some expressions of support for extremism and terrorism both in the U.S. and abroad, Greene has seemingly lumped anyone supporting the cause of the Palestinian people into categories ostensibly backing Hamas, which isn’t an accurate description. The incidents to which she is referring involved defacement of monumental structures in D.C. by large protest crowds pushing for a ceasefire amid the current war between Israel and Hamas.
Greene has been trying to characterize fellow House member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) as supportive of Hamas because of her expressions of support for the Palestinian people. (Tlaib is Palestinian.) A censure of Tlaib that Greene proposed in Congress failed.
