House condemns Trump’s tweets
4 Republicans join Dems in decrying his racist remarks
WASHINGTON — A divided House voted Tuesday night to condemn President Donald Trump’s racist remarks telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to their ancestral countries, with all but a handful of Republicans dismissing the rebuke as harassment while many Democrats pressed their leaders for harsher punishment of the president.
The imagery of the 240-187 vote was stark: A diverse Democratic caucus cast the president’s words as an affront to millions of Americans and descendants of immigrants while Republican lawmakers — the majority of them white men — stood with Trump against a resolution that rejected his “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Only four Republicans broke ranks — Reps. Susan Brooks of Indiana, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Will Hurd of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan — and joined Democrats in backing the resolution. Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich., who quit the GOP earlier this month, also voted for it.
Trump insisted in a string of tweets Tuesday that he’s not a racist — “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” he wrote — and the top two Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of
California, made identical statements when pressed on Trump’s remarks: “The president is not a racist.”
Trump also lashed out at the four Democratic women — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — for the third day in a row, accusing them of “spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate.”
The Republican National Committee provided a list comments to bolster Trump’s contention, but in none did the four women say they hate America or wanted to leave, as the president has asserted.
Three of the four lawmakers were born in the United States, and Omar is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Somalia.
“I know racism when I see it. I know racism when I feel it. And at the highest levels of government, there is no room for racism,” Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who fought for civil rights in the 1960s, said in the final minutes of the House debate.
The resolution “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
The debate played out on a raucous House floor as lawmakers attacked each other’s motives and repeatedly questioned whether their opponents had violated long-standing rules of decorum — rules that ultimately were changed after Republicans challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of the word “racist.”
Democrats, led by Pelosi, D-Calif., insisted Tuesday that they could reach no other conclusion and that condemnation was imperative, calling Trump’s comments racist — prompting Republicans to challenge her.
Pelosi said the words “are disgraceful and disgusting, and those comments are racist,” careful not to label Trump himself a racist. “How shameful to hear him continue to defend those offensive words — words that we have all heard him repeat, not only about our members, but about countless others.”
Moments later, Rep. Douglas Collins, R-Ga., moved to have Pelosi’s words taken down, a rarely invoked procedure that ground debate to a halt for more than an hour while the House parliamentarian examined whether they violated the chamber’s standards of decorum. On a party-line vote, her words stood.
A visibly frustrated Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who was presiding over the House, reprimanded his colleagues, saying that despite his efforts to be fair, they “don’t ever want to pass up an opportunity to escalate.”
“We just want to fight,” he said.