Republican lawmaker calls Juneteenth holiday bill a left-wing plot

This week, a landmark bill establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday overcame a major hurdle and passed the Senate after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the last major objectors to the legislation, said he would let it move forward. It now moves to the House.

But the bill still has opponents. On Wednesday, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) said that he would not vote for the bill — and called it a sinister plot by the left to advance "critical race theory."

"This is an effort by the Left to create a day out of whole cloth to celebrate identity politics as part of its larger efforts to make Critical Race Theory the reigning ideology of our country," said Rosendale in a statement. "The Left has made up what was primarily a Texas holiday, which they are now acting like they recently discovered, in order to continually make Americans feel bad and convince them that our country is evil."

Juneteenth commemorates the day that the last enslaved persons in the country, on plantations in Texas, were notified that the Civil War was over and they were free.

Republicans have broadly attacked any effort to memorialize or teach the effects of slavery in the United States as "critical race theory," a term they don't entirely seem to understand.

Read the whole statement below: