As of last year, the United States Congress had an approval rating of around 11 percent. The current Congress will probably go down in history as one of the most dysfunctional and ineffective groups in American history. In 2012, Congress only passed 61 bills out of 3,914 bills that had been introduced by lawmakers, or less than 2 percent of all proposed laws, the lowest since such statistics started being kept in 1947. However, this time, even the GOP got it right.
The office of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, announced Tuesday, Feb.12 that a statue of Rosa Parks will be dedicated in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. According to Boehner’s office, “this will be the first statue of an African-American woman to be placed in the Capitol as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.”
The statue will be unveiled on Feb. 27 — just after the 100th anniversary of her birth.
Ironically, it was President George W. Bush who signed legislation in 2005 that directed Congress to add a statue of Parks to the Capitol’s collection. Parks became an icon in the Civil Rights Movement in 1955 when she would not move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala.
Parks, who died in 2005, would have turned 100 this month.
