Dem
51
GOP
49
A hot topic in recent years is what to do with statues honoring Confederate leaders. Was Robert E. Lee a hero or a traitor who should have been hanged? Now Robert Kennedy Jr. has joined the fray. He was against the 2021 removal of Lee's statue in Charlottesville, which was later melted down in a furnace. He doesn't want to erase history. He said: "There were heroes in the Confederacy who didn't have slaves."
Whether Lee himself owned any slaves is complicated. His mother owned 35 slaves. Her will left five of them to her daughter and directed that after all her debts were paid, her property (which included the 30 other slaves) was to be divided equally among her three sons. Lee inherited at least a few slaves but was in the Army at the time and didn't need them, so he may have rented them out to local slaveholders for the income. But in any event, he was a slaveowner (sorry, RFK). And he did wage war against the United States, so the question of whether there ought to be statues honoring him is separate from the slavery issue.
Kennedy also said: "We should celebrate the good qualities of everybody. If we want to find people who were completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history." He noted that Lee was an extraordinary leader. It would be interesting to have a reporter ask him: "Is it fine with you if Germany has statues honoring Adolf Hitler, if Italy has statues honoring Benito Mussolini, and if Cambodia has statues honoring Pol Pot? What about the U.S. having statues honoring Isoroku Yamamoto? After all, he played an important role in U.S. history." Kennedy also said he is in favor of keeping Columbus Day and has no interest in replacing it with Indigenous Peoples' Day. We would love to see what would happen if the Young Conservatives invited him to speak at Columbia University.
What is Kennedy up to? Is he saying this stuff to get on the ballot in Alabama? Do his backers know what he is doing? If he is basically a Republican plant who is being put there to pull votes away from Joe Biden, backing Confederate insurrectionists is probably a poor way to do it, as it might win over otherwise-Trump voters in the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia. Is he planning to run for governor of Mississippi when Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) is term-limited in 2027? Who knows. (V)