Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called for several Confederate monuments to be removed from Capitol Hill Thursday, but an obscure law leaves that duty strictly to fellow Democrat and Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe.
“If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy, I call upon Speaker Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately,” Pelosi said in her statement. As she learned during her stint as Speaker of the House, lawmakers don’t actually have that power.
There are eight statues that have some significance to the Confederacy, including Virginia’s memorial to Robert E. Lee, and Mississippi’s statue of former southern president Jefferson Davis. Each statue is officially owned by the state that gifted the memorial to the Capitol and is part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.
The Collection is managed by the Architect of the Capitol, and has been since 1864 when a federal code invited each of the 50 states to send no more than two statues to the hill as a “gift.”
“The president is hereby authorized to invite each and all the States to provide and furnish statues, in marble or bronze, not exceeding two in number for each State, of deceased persons who have been citizens thereof, and illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each State may deem worthy,” Sec. 1814 of the Revised Statutes states, according to the office of the Architect.
Essentially, governance over which statues reside in our nation’s Capitol rests with individual state leadership. Lawmakers or governors in each state can decide to remove a statue and replace it with someone else, a decision that’s only happened seven times in the program’s history.
As the governor of Virginia, McAuliffe would have the ability to remove the statue legally, since there is no existing state code that requires the decision be made by the Republican-controlled state legislature.
Pelosi understands that it’s not easy to remove a statue. Early in her tenure, she made the decision to move the Lee statue to a less populated area of the Capitol and put a statue of Rosa Parks in the main hall of the complex, she was unable to remove it completely on her own. Surprisingly enough, Virginia had a Democratic governor then too, current Sen. Tim Kaine, who didn’t offer to replace the statue at the time.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for comment on the story, no one in his office returned our calls.
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