Which current members of Congress voted against making MLK Day a federal holiday?
In 1983, Congress voted overwhelmingly to approve legislation to honor the memory of the late Martin Luther King Jr. by observing a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January. But not every elected official was onboard with the effort.
Now the decades-old issue of who opposed making MLK Day a holiday has returned to the political scene, as one House Republican leader has faced scrutiny for his opposition to the day in conjunction with a larger controversy over race.
New House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, came under fire last month for having voted twice against a state version of the holiday while serving in the local legislature. (The votes were unearthed as part of a larger story about a previously unreported speech Scalise delivered at a 2002 conference sponsored by a white-supremacist group.) Because many states took decades after the federal decision to implement MLK Day, Scalise’s votes against the holiday came late: He was one of six Louisiana statehouse members to vote against the holiday in 2004 and one of three to vote against it in 1999. ...
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