rssCost of Capitol Visitor Center Set to Jump Once More
Monday, July 06, 2009 at 5:56 pm
- 2 Comments
When the Capitol Visitor Center opened to the public in December, the $621 million pricetag raised plenty of eyebrows, not least because the cost represented a jump of nearly $360 million above original estimates.
And it’s only going up.
The Senate on Monday passed a bill to engrave “In God We Trust” and the Pledge of Allegiance — including “one nation under god” — at prominent spots in the 580,000 square foot visitor center. Speaking on the chamber floor just before the proposal passed unanimously, sponsor Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said the changes are needed because the current design “conspicuously ignores America’s unique religious heritage and the role that heritage played in the founding of the Republic.”
Indeed, the original exhibits that are there now seem to suggest the federal government was the solution to all our problems in the fulfillment of all human aspirations — as if we were a government with a nation, instead of the other way around.
DeMint is normally one of the loudest fiscal hawks in Washington. But in this case, he says, the $150,000 cost is worth the trouble to correct “the historical whitewash of the original design,” to “welcome god” back into the center, and to highlight the “all important relationship between faith and freedom in America.”
2 Comments
Comment posted July 8, 2009 @ 8:00 am
Enough of this revisionist crap. E Pluribus Unum was the original motto, and that (if they want to be historically correct) is all that should be engraved.
Comment posted July 8, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
If DeMint is so worried about ignoring “America’s unique religious heritage and the role that heritage played in the founding of the Republic”, then why the focus on things which only date back to the 1950s? That's when “In God We Trust” was made a “national motto” by act of Congress – prior to that “E Pluribus Unum” was the motto we, as a nation, were proud of. Likewise the Pledge of Allegiance was recited for many years by many school children without the words “Under God” in it and somehow the country survived.
If the congressman wishes to honor the role religion played in the founding of our nation, then he should go back to the only overtly religious phrase used by those founders: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Far better to celebrate THAT religious heritage, than to spend $150,000 trying to bolster religious posturing left over from the McCarthy era.
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