Juneteenth started as an informal Texas holiday.* Last year, at the height of street violence in the name of racial justice for Blacks, the Republican-controlled Senate could not be bothered to push through federal legislation, sponsored by the senior senator from Texas, John Cornyn. This was the sort of legislation that President Trump loved to sign, and would have played right into the heart of his political strategy to make every ethnic and racial group electorally competitive, not the taken-for-granted electoral “property” of Democrats or Republicans. Now Chuck Schumer showed exactly what Mitch McConnell could have done, but chose not to do, out of contempt for Black Americans, or cluelessness, or a burning desire to tank the 2020 election.

Senator Chuck Schumer, acting like a real Senate Majority Leader, put forward a motion for unanimous consent on Senator Cornyn’s legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. This led to immediate passage after RepubliCAN’T Ron Johnson finally abandoned his “principled” opposition, used by McConnell last year to tank the bill put forward by Republican Senator Cornyn before Juneteenth. Ron Johnson’s laughable objection was the supposed $400 million dollar “cost” of one less workday, converted into a paid federal holiday. Johnson even tried killing the Republican bill last year by proposing an amendment eliminating Columbus Day in the trade-off. In an era of multi-trillion spending bills and annual budgets, $400 million is a rounding error. It is a joke, an insincere objection.

Last year, President Trump followed the long tradition of issuing a Presidential Message for Juneteenth from the White House [emphasis added]: