Schumer, Flake urge support for renaming Senate building after McCain
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) are urging their colleagues to support renaming a Senate office building after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), saying his death has left them “looking for a way to honor his service to this nation.”
Schumer and Flake are privately sending a “dear colleague” letter to every senator urging them to sign on as co-sponsors to their forthcoming resolution, which would rename the Russell Senate Office Building after the late GOP senator.
“Renaming the Russell building in his honor ensures that his story will be told with the hope that inspiration becomes motivation and future leaders emerge with his brand of courage and commitment,” Schumer and Flake write to their colleagues in the letter.
They added their “strong belief is that future generations should know the story of Senator John McCain.”
The Russell Senate Office Building is where McCain’s office and the Armed Services Committee, which McCain oversaw, is located.
The letter aimed at building support for renaming the building comes as some GOP senators are pushing back against the idea.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hasn’t publicly said if he supports renaming the building. Instead, he said from the Senate floor on Tuesday that he was establishing a committee to determine how they would honor McCain.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) noted McConnell has established a process for how the Senate will decide how it honors McCain but noted that Russell was a “respected” senator.{mosads}
Russell, a Democratic senator from Georgia, is considered controversial because of his opposition to civil rights legislation. But asked about that on Tuesday, Shelby noted that he was a “man of his time.”
“If you want to get into that you have to get into George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all of our — most of our Founding Fathers, maybe with the exception of Hamilton,” he added. “It’s easy to prejudge what they should have done.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said he would follow leadership, noting that Russell lived during a “different time” and was a “great senator.”
“I’m going to follow the leadership on this,” he said. “I mean that’s a big decision on what to do. I want to appropriately honor Sen. McCain and I’ll vote for almost anything that will do that.”
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