The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 285-120 to replace the bust of former Chief Justice Roger Taney from the US Capitol, as well as to remove other Confederate statues that are on public display at the building. Roger Taney had declared that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States. 

“This sacred space, this temple of democracy has been defiled for too long. We ought not to forget history. We must learn from history. But we ought not to honor that which defiles the principles for which we … stand. It’s time to remove those symbols of slavery, segregation and sedition from these halls,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on the House floor ahead of the vote. 

All Democrats and 67 Republicans supported the legislation, which requires states to remove statues of “persons who served as an officer or voluntarily with the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a State while the State was in rebellion against the United States” from the collection.

These statues need to be removed within 45 days of the resolution’s enactment. 

“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy. The statues that we display should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation. Monuments to men, or people who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to those ideals,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on the floor.