Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has called for replacing Juneteenth with Election Day as a national holiday, deriding the celebration of the end of slavery in the US as “useless.”
“Single day voting, on Election Day,” the 37-year-old entrepreneur and longshot 2024 White House contender proposed in a speech before Iowa voters on Saturday. “We will make Election Day a holiday in the United States of America, so there’s no complaints about it.”
However, Ramaswamy told the crowd that in order to make room for another federal holiday, one of the current 11 would need to be removed from the calendar.
“Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up,” Ramaswamy said. “You can’t have everything be a holiday, but we’ll cancel one of the other ones and make Election Day a holiday.”
In 2021, President Biden signed legislation declaring June 19, or Juneteenth, a federal holiday.
The celebration commemorates the day in 1865 that federal troops began enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 in Galveston, Texas.
It was the first federal holiday to be added to the calendar since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.
When asked to clarify whether he believes Juneteenth is a “useless” holiday, Ramaswamy told NBC News: “I basically do.”
Ramaswamy added that he believes Juneteenth was declared a holiday with a “cultural gun to our head” following nationwide rioting over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020.
“I think that if we made a national commemorative holiday for everything that’s happened in our history, we’d have no working days left,” he said. “But I think the spirit of Juneteenth we already channeled into other holidays, like Martin Luther King Day, like Presidents Day. I think we can commemorate the spirit of that holiday separately.
“So I think that we shouldn’t have redundant holidays that celebrate overlapping purposes, it should have a distinctive purpose,” Ramaswamy added. “And I think, let’s be honest, the reason for making that a holiday was under political duress, as a political hostage situation on the back of the death of George Floyd. And I think that that is not how we create holidays. We should not create holidays with a cultural gun to our head. And that’s what happened.”
Ramaswamy is polling at 6% nationally, according to a RealClearPolitics average of Republican primary surveys — well behind former President Donald Trump (53.7%) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (15.7%).
