Louie Gohmert Urges House to Ban Democrat Party for Supporting Slavery

Gohmert’s resolution provides a long list of instances in which the Democratic Party supported slavery, the Confederacy, and racist policies, including:

• The Democratic Party platforms of 1840, 1844, 1848, 1852, and 1856 stated “that all efforts of the abolitionists, or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery . . . are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.”
   
• The Democratic Party platform of 1856 declared that “new states” to the Union should be admitted “with or without domestic slavery, as [the state] may elect.”
   
• The Democratic Party platform of 1856 declared that “we recognize the right of the people of all the Territories . . .  to form a Constitution, with or without domestic slavery.”
   
• The Democratic Party platform of 1860, in seeking to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that required law enforcement officials to arrest any individual suspected of being a runaway slave, stated that “the enactments of the State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect.”
   
• No Democrat in Congress supported the 14th Amendment, which gave full citizenship to freed slaves. It passed in 1868 with 94 percent Republican support and zero support from Democrats.
   
• No Democrat in Congress supported the 15th Amendment, which gave freed slaves the right to vote. It passed in 1870 with 100 percent Republican support and zero support from Democrats.
   
• Various state Democratic Party officials enacted policies to disenfranchise and “systematically suppress” the right of African Americans to vote. The resolution specifically cites the 1902 Constitution of the State of Virginia that disenfranchised about 90 percent of the African American voters at the time, forcibly reducing the number of eligible African American voters from about 147,000 in 1901 to about 10,000 by 1905. The resolution notes that this measure was “supported almost exclusively by Virginia Democrats.”
   
• The administration of President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, “began a racial segregation policy for U.S. government employees and, by 1914, the Wilson administration’s Civil Service instituted the requirement that a photograph be submitted with each employment application.”
   
• When the Democratic Party held its national convention in 1924 in New York City at Madison Square Garden, the event was commonly referred to as the “Klan-Bake” due to the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the party.
   
• Senate Democrats held a 75-calendar day filibuster against the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
   
• Former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), a known recruiter for the KKK, led the Democrats to oppose civil rights for African Americans.
   
• Democrats “enacted and enforced Jim Crow laws and civil codes that forced segregation and restricted freedoms” for African Americans.
   
• In June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ordered the removal of the portraits of four previous Speakers of the House  who served in the Confederacy, stating that these portraits “set back our nation’s work to confront and combat bigotry.” However, Gohmert’s resolution notes that the Speakers that Pelosi removed (Robert M.T. Hunter, Howell Cobb, James L. Orr, and Charles F. Crisp) were all Democrats.

Gohmert’s resolution also calls for Pelosi to remove from the House wing of the Capitol of any House office building any item that “names, symbolizes or mentions any political organization or party that has ever held a public position that supported slavery or the Confederacy.”

Gohmert told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement on Thursday that this resolution outlines that a “great portion” of the Democratic Party is “filled with racism and hatred.”...