Let's check in with the 6 sitting lawmakers who voted against MLK day
Four days after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down at the Lorraine Hotel in 1968, John Conyers, a young black congressman from Michigan, introduced a bill to memorialize the civil rights hero with a federal holiday.
The bill did not pass.
It actually took 15 years for the bill to get signed into law. And when it did, it was without the support of the following lawmakers who are still in the Congress and Senate. (New York published this list in 2013, when there were still eight.) Let’s see how they explain this one.
Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama)
Shelby started off his political career as Democrat, but he voted against MLK Day as well as an extension of the Voting Rights Act. He later went on to switch to the Republican Party.
Fusion reached out to Shelby’s office for comment on his vote, but did not hear back by time of publication.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa)
“Senator Grassley’s vote against an MLK Day holiday was purely an economic decision both in the cost to the broader economy in lost productivity, and the cost to the taxpayers with the federal government closed,” an aide to the senator recently told The Hill.
In 2004, Grassley also signed on as a co-sponsor to a bill that honored King.
Sen. John McCain (Arizona)
McCain made a formal apology for his bad vote during a visit to the Lorraine Hotel, where King was was shot and killed, on the anniversary of his death.
“I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona,” said McCain. “We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans.”