On June 16, 2021, the U.S. House voted on whether to make Juneteenth — June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free — a federal holiday.
The Senate had already passed it unanimously. Not one senator objected.
In the House, the vote was 415 to 14.
Mike Rogers was one of the 14.
Who else was in that group
The full list of no votes on the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, straight from the House Clerk's roll call:
Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Andrew Clyde, Scott DesJarlais, Paul Gosar, Ronny Jackson, Doug LaMalfa, Thomas Massie, Tom McClintock, Ralph Norman, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Matt Rosendale, Chip Roy, and Tom Tiffany.
Fourteen people out of 429 who voted. That is not a party position. Republicans voted for this bill 195 to 14.
His own delegation went the other way
Alabama sent seven members to the House that year. Here is how they voted on the same roll call:
| Member | Party | Vote |
|---|---|---|
| Robert Aderholt | R | Yea |
| Jerry Carl | R | Yea |
| Barry Moore | R | Yea |
| Gary Palmer | R | Yea |
| Terri Sewell | D | Yea |
| Mo Brooks | R | Nay |
| Mike Rogers | R | Nay |
Four of Alabama's six House Republicans voted to recognize the end of slavery as a national holiday. Rogers didn't.
He represents Alabama's 3rd District, which is about 20% Black.
Alabama itself disagrees with him
Here's the part that's hard to argue around.
Look at the State of Alabama's official 2026 holiday calendar, published by the State Personnel Department. State offices close, with pay, on:
- Monday, April 27 — Confederate Memorial Day
- Monday, June 1 — Jefferson Davis' Birthday
- Friday, June 19 — Juneteenth
Alabama — a state that still gives its employees a paid day off for the birthday of the president of the Confederacy, and that observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day jointly with Robert E. Lee's birthday — puts Juneteenth on its own holiday calendar.
The congressman from Alabama's 3rd District voted against doing the same thing nationally.
He has never explained it
We looked for a public statement from Mike Rogers explaining his vote and could not find one. No press release. No floor speech. No interview we could locate.
That is partly a function of how he operates. Rogers has not held a public, in-person town hall since 2017 — the meeting where he told a constituent to "be a man or we'll take it outside," and called the idea that he needs town halls "laughable." So the obvious venue for a voter in Anniston or Auburn to ask him about it does not exist.
A vote is a public act. This one took about ten seconds and put him in a group of fourteen. Five years later there is still no answer on the record about why.
What the vote was actually about
It's worth being precise about what Rogers voted against, because it was not a spending program or a mandate or a regulation.
The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act did one thing: it added June 19 to the list of federal holidays. That's it. It commemorates the day the last enslaved Americans learned that slavery was over — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because nobody had told them.
Ninety-seven percent of the House thought that was worth marking. Every single senator did.
Mike Rogers, who has represented east Alabama since 2003, did not — and hasn't said why since.
Source
House Roll Call 170, June 16, 2021 — Juneteenth National Independence Day Act (S. 475) — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives.
