A move is afoot on Capitol Hill to replace President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s image on the dime with Ronald Reagan’s.
A group of 80 members of Congress have co-sponsored a bill to put The Gipper’s face on the coin.
Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., introduced the bill.
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“It is particularly fitting to honor the Freedom President on this particular piece of coinage because, as has been pointed out, President Reagan was wounded under the left arm by a bullet that had ricocheted and flattened to the size of a dime,” Souder wrote to colleagues in the House of Representatives.
“FDR believed the federal government should spend your dimes. Ronald Reagan believed the people should spend their own dimes. I think it’s clear that the dimes in your pocket should bear Ronald Reagan’s image,” co-sponsor Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., said, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
Delano Roosevelt, grandson of the former president, wasn’t impressed with the proposal.
“I could care less about who’s on the dime,” the former Long Beach, Calif., city councilman told the paper. “But it’s all about how they are going about it. … And I think it’s embarrassing that (the congressmen) have nothing else better to do than to do some sort of grandstanding thing just to get them on ‘This Week In Review.”‘
According to the report, Souder spokesman Martin Green said this bill was fueled by Republican outrage in the wake of the CBS miniseries “The Reagans,” which the network eventually canceled. The program aired on the Showtime cable network on Sunday.
Souder says he is willing to compromise with Democrats who might not want to dump FDR completely from the coin. An arrangement could be set up to rotate the two presidents’ images on the dime.
The Daily News says it could cost between $30,000 and $80,000 to redesign the dime with Reagan’s image.
Changing a coin does not take an act of Congress; the U.S. Mint can make that decision independently. The bill is meant simply to show support for the change.
Related stories:
Boycott launched of CBS’ ‘Reagans’
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