U.S. House pulls bill over Confederate flag flap

Susan Davis | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — House GOP leaders were forced Thursday to pull a spending bill from the floor after an amendment regarding the display of the Confederate flag sparked a swift and angry backlash from Democrats.

"House Republicans want to keep the Confederate flag — and all that it stands for — flying high," said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., one of a number of Democrats who took to the floor late Wednesday and early Thursday to denounce Republicans with accusations of racism.

Republicans caught off guard by the intensity of the rebuke said the amendment was only intended to clarify established and new guidelines on the use and sale of the Confederate flag set by the Obama administration.

The optics and the timing of the vote — the same day South Carolina lawmakers voted to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds — forced party leaders to pull the bill to try and defuse the situation.

"I do not want this to become some political football," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, "I want members on both sides of the aisle to sit down, and let's have a conversation about how to address what frankly has become a very thorny issue."

The White House piled on Thursday, criticizing the House GOP and the Republican Party overall when it comes to race issues.

"These are the same House Republicans who voted for a party leader who once described himself as, quote, 'David Duke without the baggage,'" spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday, in reference to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La.

"These are the same congressional Republicans who have declined to criticize the race-baiting rhetoric of a leading Republican presidential candidate," he added, referring to Donald Trump.

"So when you hear me say that congressional Republicans have an agenda that is out of step with the vast majority of Americans, this record at least in part is what I'm referring to," Earnest said.

Boehner spokesman Cory Fritz said the comments were "completely dishonest and beneath the dignity of the office of the presidency."

The House had been debating the annual Interior Appropriations bill, which sets funding for the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, the Smithsonian Institution and other agencies.

During debate on the bill this week, the House approved without opposition a trio of amendments restricting the Confederate flag, including one by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to prohibit federal funds for the purchase or display of the flag on any lands overseen by the National Park Service and two amendments by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., to prohibit the use of flags on graves of Confederate soldiers and to ban the park service from selling merchandise with flag imagery on it.

A bloc of southern lawmakers took issue with the gravesite prohibition, in part because 10 Southern states observe Confederate Memorial Day, an official holiday on which Confederate graves are often decorated for the day with the flag, and often by family descendants. The lawmakers threatened to derail the underlying spending bill if they were not allowed a vote on a clarifying amendment.

In consultation with GOP leaders, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., the bill's chief sponsor, announced late Wednesday that there would be another flag amendment intended to assert that the flag can be displayed in narrow circumstances, such as on Confederate gravesites, under the guidelines established by the administration.

According to 2010 Interior Department guidelines, states that honor Confederate Memorial Day may permit groups at no public cost to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers "with small Confederate flags" that must be "removed from the graves as soon as possible" after the holiday.

"The intent of the leadership's amendment was to clear up any confusion and maintain the Obama administration's policies with respect to those historical and educational exceptions," Calvert said in a statement. "To be clear, I wholeheartedly support the Park Service's prohibitions regarding the Confederate flag and the amendment did nothing to change these prohibitions."

Calvert conceded he should have conferred with Democrats to explain the intent of the amendment.

"Looking back, I regret not conferring with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, especially my ranking member Betty McCollum, prior to offering the leadership's amendment and fully explaining its intent given the strong feelings members of the House feel regarding this important and sensitive issue," he said.

A national debate over the Confederate flag was sparked last month after a mass shooting of nine African Americans in a South Carolina church allegedly by Dylann Roof, a white man who had posed with the flag in pictures before the shooting.

Also Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., offered a privileged resolution ordering the speaker to remove the Mississippi state flag, which contains imagery of the Confederate flag, from all areas of the House wing of the U.S. Capitol. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., instead moved to refer the resolution to committee for consideration, which the House approved 238-176 on a party line vote.

Boehner told reporters Thursday he wants to find consensus among members, but he did not say whether it would be through committee, a special panel or some other process.

"I just think that we ought to address this in a fairly broad way, and I've got a pretty good idea of the kind of members that ought to be a part of that conversation," he said.

As for the underlying Interior spending bill, Boehner said it would be set aside "until we can come to some resolution on this."

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