If U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, thought fellow Republicans in Congress would rally behind his call to bring a Confederate monument back to Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, he was sadly mistaken.
Clyde’s call was met with GOP silence.
As a House spending panel worked on a 2025 funding measure for military construction, Clyde offered an amendment to force the Pentagon to return a Confederate monument removed from Arlington late last year.
The Confederate Memorial had been placed in the nation’s most important military cemetery in 1914.
It’s no surprise that Clyde would lead this effort. During his time in Congress, the Georgia Republican has become the unofficial champion of the Confederacy on Capitol Hill.
“This monument in Arlington was a powerful symbol of the healing and unification of our nation after the deep divisions of the Civil War,” Clyde told his colleagues. “Let us fight for the principles of healing and unity.”
The argument sounds straightforward. But when you examine the monument’s details, there isn’t much about unity.
The cemetery describes it as “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy,” which included “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
For example, the memorial included depictions of a Black ”Mammy” holding the young child of a white Southern officer. There was a slave following his owner into war and a Latin inscription that extolled the ”Lost Cause.”
The decision to remove the monument was undertaken by a special Pentagon panel established by Congress to review names, symbols and monuments that honored the Confederacy.
Clyde’s call to restore the memorial to Arlington was scorned by Democrats.
“It’s hard to believe that we’re actually having this discussion,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.
“We shouldn’t honor those who betrayed our country and fought to preserve slavery,” U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said as she criticized GOP efforts to dismantle military diversity programs.
“Now you want to restore hateful, racist, bigoted symbols,” Lee said.
No Republicans spoke in favor of Clyde’s amendment, which foreshadowed what happened next — as Republicans refused to help Clyde put committee members on the record about the Confederate memorial.
“Failed by voice vote” was the final result.
A little while later, Clyde was on his own again — voting against the overall military construction funding bill. He was the only Republican to join with Democrats in opposition.
“You’re recorded as a ‘No?’ ” asked a bemused panel chair, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who probably could have rattled off the various military projects in Georgia in the bill that Clyde was voting against.
Clyde quickly changed his vote to ”Yes.”
Jamie Dupree has covered national politics and Congress from Washington since the Reagan administration. His column appears weekly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more, check out his Capitol Hill newsletter at http://jamiedupree.substack.com.
