Contact: Timothy Svoboda, (202) 225-2476
(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) released the following statement after voting no on H.R. 7573, a bill that would remove statues from the U.S. Capitol and replace one of the busts with that of Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of the key figures in making late-term abortions legal in the United States.
“The thing that forced me to vote no on me this bill was the request that Justice Thurgood Marshall be given a bust in the U.S. Capitol,” said Grothman. “Marshall not only voted to legalize abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision, finding it a Constitutional right after decades of the practice being illegal, but also according to his biography, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, the initial draft of the majority opinion of Roe v. Wade only covered the first three months of pregnancy and it was Justice Marshall and Justice Brennan who successfully lobbied to take the extreme step of making abortion legal in the United States all the way to viability, otherwise known as late-term abortions.
To our country’s embarrassment, this means that Marshall’s efforts made the United States one of just seven countries worldwide that allow abortions after 20 weeks, joining Canada, Netherlands, Singapore, Vietnam, North Korea and Communist China, according to the Washington Post.
Because Marshall was instrumental in pushing the opinion of the court in an extreme direction, I do not believe that he, one of our country’s biggest pro-abortion figures who helped enable the silencing of countless lives, should be rewarded with a bust in the U.S. Capitol.
It is also concerning that many long-serving Members of Congress supported this bill now, four months before an election, instead of the many decades that they have previously served. I personally have always found it inappropriate that Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, represents Georgia as one of their two statues in the U.S. Capitol. Surely Georgia and the other states who have statues in the Capitol commemorating individuals associated with the Confederacy have more distinguished individuals who can represent their state.
If the authors of this bill wanted more bipartisan support, they should not have requested a bust of such an ardent abortion activist, Thurgood Marshall. I hope that in the future, the Democratic leaders in the House will reach across the aisle in search of a bipartisan solution to issues like this that will both protect the integrity of the U.S. Capitol and accurately reflect the values of the American people.”
