Here Are The 4 Current Members of Congress Who Voted Against Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is lauded near-universally by politicians every year, but there are still four members serving in the U.S. Congress who voted against the King holiday — 3 at the federal level and 1 as a state legislator.

Then-President Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the federal Martin Luther King holiday into law in November of 1983 after the U.S. Senate passed the bill by a 78-22 margin, while the House of Representatives had voted in favor of it by a margin of 338-90. That’s over 78 percent of those who voted, well above the two-thirds needed to override a veto.

The current members of Congress who joined Sen. Jesse Helms in voting against the holiday are all Republicans, although one was a Democrat at the time and later switched parties. They are: Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). current Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) — who was a member of the House, and was then a Democrat, when he voted against the holiday — and Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY).

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) is the only other member to have voted against a King holiday, in 1999 and 2004, but at the state level.

As tempting as it is to view these votes as relics of a past that America has evolved well past, and could never happen these days, a new poll sheds some doubt on that proposition. The latest The Economist/YouGov poll shows that even fewer Republican voters support the King holiday today than did in 1983.

Asked “Do you think that Martin Luther King’s birthday should be a Federal Holiday?”, only 41 percent of Republicans said “yes,” MLK Day should be a federal holiday, with the remaining 59 percent either against it (36%) or not sure (23%).

That’s less Republican support than an October, 1983 poll that found 48 percent of Republicans at the time favored establishing the law. Forty-two percent of Republicans were opposed, while 10 percent were “not sure.”