Lawmakers' rebuke of President Donald Trump's efforts to tank annual defense policy legislation last week has paved the way for a yearslong process to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases and scrub other monuments to the secession.
But there are still unanswered questions about the nascent process, which must kick off by March, including who will ultimately pick the new names of bases, who will serve on the panel and whether President-elect Joe Biden could preempt some of the panel's work with a speedier executive action of his own after Inauguration Day.
The National Defense Authorization Act mandates the removal of Confederate names from Defense Department-owned property within three years and tasks an eight-member commission with developing a plan to carry it out.
The provision became law last week after lawmakers overrode Trump's veto of the defense bill, H.R. 6395 (116).
Public scrutiny has centered on the 10 Army bases that are named for Confederate leaders — including major installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia — but the review will assess myriad other military property that honor the Confederacy, including a pair of Navy ships, buildings and other memorials.
The missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville, for instance, is named for a Confederate victory in the Civil War, and the oceanographic survey ship USNS Maury is named for Matthew Fontaine Maury, who served in the Confederate Navy. The U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Military Academy have also faced calls from lawmakers to rename buildings that honor officers who served in the Confederacy, including a barracks at West Point named for Robert E. Lee.
Despite bipartisan support in the House and Senate for renaming bases and removing other Confederate honors — and the inclusion of similar provisions in both chambers' defense bills — the effort became one of the most contentious aspects of negotiations on the legislation. The Senate bill included a three-year renaming process, authored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), while the House initially adopted a one-year process, sponsored by Reps. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.).
Proponents saw removing the racist relics as a must-have in a year marked by racial unrest in the U.S. Trump, however, opposed renaming bases, equating removing Confederate leaders' names with rewriting history.
Bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate handily overrode Trump's veto, ensuring the bill became law for a 60th consecutive year and that the renaming process will soon kick off.
Here's how it will work:
The process: The legislation mandates the removal of Confederate names, symbols, monuments and other honors from Defense Department property — including bases, buildings, streets, ships, aircraft, weapons and equipment — within three years and tasks the eight-member panel with carrying it out. The bill exempts Confederate grave markers from the review.
The commission is charged with developing criteria for identifying Confederate monuments and recommending procedures for renaming the property and gathering input from local communities.
The bill does not explicitly task the commission with coming up with new names for bases, buildings or other property that's selected for renaming, though a Senate aide said the panel has the latitude to do so. The aide added that if the panel doesn't wade into the issue, the Army secretary or defense secretary have the authority to kick off a process to come up with new names.
The panel is required to brief the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on its progress by Oct. 1.
The commission must present a written report by Oct. 1, 2022, that details the assets that will be removed or renamed, the criteria used to select them, the local input gathered and the costs associated with the removals and renamings. The Pentagon will have until early 2024 — three years after the bill's enactment — to implement the commission's plan.
The panel: The eight members of the panel must be appointed by the Pentagon and congressional leaders within 45 days of the defense bill's enactment.
The defense secretary is tasked with appointing half the panel members. The four leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees — Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) — each must appoint one panelist.
The panel must then hold its first meeting within two months of the bill becoming law.
The money: Lawmakers authorized a $2 million operating budget for the commission and its activities, which was offset from the Army operations and maintenance account for fiscal 2021.
Leaders of the House Appropriations Committee separately allocated $1 million to cover expenses for the Army to rename installations and other assets in annual defense spending legislation that passed over the summer. A compromise full-year spending package that became law last month, however, did not set aside any money specifically for the renaming effort.
What will Biden do: The new law doesn't foreclose the possibility that Biden's incoming administration could move to rename the bases sooner.
Biden has expressed support for removing the names of Confederate leaders from military installations, but hasn't indicated if he'll go beyond what lawmakers agreed on to move faster.
"Here" - Google News
January 06, 2021 at 04:24AM
https://ift.tt/2JL5Juq
The Pentagon has 3 years to strip Confederate names from bases. Here's what comes next - POLITICO
"Here" - Google News
https://ift.tt/39D7kKR
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25244079/4.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment