Bored House Republicans waste our resources on bill mocking statue replacement task force

A group of extrem­ist right wing state leg­is­la­tors in Olympia are so bereft of use­ful work to do that they’ve intro­duced a bill sole­ly meant to heap scorn upon a bill intro­duced by their Demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­ter­parts in the Sen­ate last month.

HB 2120 was just dropped by four­teen Repub­li­can mem­bers of the Wash­ing­ton State House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. It is intend­ed to ridicule leg­is­la­tion pro­posed by Sen­a­tor Reuven Car­lyle (both D‑36th Dis­trict) that would cre­ate a task force to rec­om­mend replac­ing the stat­ues of Mar­cus Whit­man on dis­play in the State Capi­tol in Olympia and the Nation­al Statu­to­ry Hall in the Dis­trict of Columbia.

“The leg­is­la­ture finds that under rig­or­ous, objec­tive review, Mar­cus Whit­man does not meet the stan­dards of being one our state’s top hon­orees,” the bill says (PDF), direct­ing that a work group be cre­at­ed to find anoth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ure who can be hon­ored by the State of Wash­ing­ton for their contributions.

Car­lyle’s bill, intro­duced last month, had a pub­lic hear­ing on Jan­u­ary 30th. No exec­u­tive ses­sion has been sched­uled and it does­n’t appear that the bill will move.

A group of House Repub­li­cans led by Bran­don Vick and Matt Shea, not enam­ored with the prospect of replac­ing the Whit­man stat­ue, have wast­ed pub­lic resources and non­par­ti­san staff time on a joke bill which pur­ports to study and make rec­om­men­da­tions on a stat­ue to replace the bronze sculp­ture of Vladimir Lenin on dis­play in Fre­mont, one of the neigh­bor­hoods Car­lyle represents.

What’s tru­ly pathet­ic is that Vick and Shea weren’t will­ing to put in the effort to get their facts right despite hav­ing an appar­ent abun­dance of free time on their hands. This is evi­dent from their bad­ly writ­ten pre­am­ble, which false­ly char­ac­ter­izes Lenin as “one of our state’s top hon­orees with a stat­ue dis­play in Seattle.”

The bil­l’s first sec­tion is seem­ing­ly meant to be a con­de­scend­ing his­to­ry les­son, but it fails at this. It is filled with pas­sages describ­ing Lenin’s evil acts. Hilar­i­ous­ly, the back­sto­ry of the stat­ue itself — which is the sub­ject of the bill! — is entire­ly omitted.

If these Repub­li­cans had both­ered to learn about the his­to­ry of the object they’re crit­i­ciz­ing, then they would know that the Lenin statute was not com­mis­sioned by the State of Wash­ing­ton, was not sculpt­ed in this coun­try, and was not even intend­ed by its mak­er to hon­or Lenin. The Bul­gar­i­an sculp­tor who made it, Emil Venkov, want­ed to crit­i­cize Lenin as an oppres­sive fig­ure and a vio­lent man.

This is why the stat­ue shows Lenin with rifles and flames instead of books, which is how the Bol­she­vik leader was con­ven­tion­al­ly depict­ed in com­mu­nist countries.

It was com­mis­sioned in 1981 by the then com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment of Czech­slo­va­kia and dis­played in Poprad pri­or to the col­lapse of the War­saw Pact in 1989. It was sub­se­quent­ly recov­ered from a scrap­yard by an Issaquah teacher, Lewis Carpenter.

Car­pen­ter died before find­ing a loca­tion to per­ma­nent­ly dis­play the statue.

The stat­ue almost got melt­ed down after that, but Peter Bevis, the founder of the foundry where it was to be scrapped, suc­ceed­ed in get­ting it held in trust by the Fre­mont Cham­ber of Com­merce until a buy­er could be found. To date, no buy­er has been found, and the statute remains on dis­play in Fremont.

Nei­ther the City of Seat­tle nor the State of Wash­ing­ton are respon­si­ble for the sculp­ture. It is pri­vate­ly owned and is on dis­play on pri­vate land.

Vick, Shea, and com­pa­ny could have learned all this in a mat­ter of min­utes just from read­ing Wikipedia, but it seems they did­n’t both­er. Too bad… it could have saved them from the embar­rass­ment of being exposed as a bunch of lazy ignoramuses.

Since the Unit­ed States and the State of Wash­ing­ton have these legal con­cepts called free­dom of speech and pri­vate prop­er­ty rights, the Leg­is­la­ture has no author­i­ty to decide what hap­pens to the Lenin statute.

If Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Vick, Shea, and their cohort aren’t inter­est­ed in doing the seri­ous work of leg­is­lat­ing, then they should resign to give Wash­ing­to­ni­ans who would like to con­tribute to their state’s well-being that opportunity.

Edi­tor’s note: The orig­i­nal ver­sion of this post stat­ed that HB 2120 was a response to a dif­fer­ent bill intro­duced in the Wash­ing­ton State House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives; how­ev­er, HB 2120 is actu­al­ly a response to Sen­ate Bill 5237. The text of this post and its title have been updat­ed and cor­rect­ed to reflect this.