“Ordinary people I talk to are uniformly in support of the name,” says one founder of the caucus, Chap Petersen, a Democratic state senator who gave Tribbett his start in local politics. He and his fellow co-chairs are indignant over the federal government’s sudden focus on the issue. “This is equivalent to living in a house for 60 years and somebody comes in and says, ‘I’m going to take away your property, your land, because I don’t like the style of the house,’ ” argues Del. David Ramadan, a Republican who says he was a diehard Redskins fan growing up in Beirut. “This is a private Virginia business that is now being persecuted by the trademark office and 50 U.S. senators who have nothing better to do.”
Meanwhile, Ramadan’s colleague, Republican Del. Jackson Miller, specifically frames his argument around the Native American plight. “Is Harry Reid going to go and say the ‘Apache’ helicopter is offensive?” he says, predicting that he would not. “From the same military that destroyed the Apache Nation?” (Conservative commentator Dana Loesch, dropping an Andrew Jackson reference, made a similar point on Twitter: “Democrats like to pretend American Indians don’t exist except when they want photo ops or their land. Period.”)
Besides Tribbett and a few members of the Redskins Pride Caucus, there is scant Democratic support for the name. All 50 senators who cosigned the open letter opposing the name were Democrats (or left-leaning independents). None of the U.S. senators from Virginia or Maryland—Dems all—publicly favors “Redskins.” Nor, apparently, do any of their D.C.-area colleagues in the House of Representatives—many of whom have already come out against it, and none of whom, as far as I could tell, have spoken out in favor of it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member