Steve King loses House committee seats over white-supremacy remark
House Republican leaders removed Rep. Steve King of Iowa from the Judiciary and Agriculture committees Monday night as party officials scrambled to appear tough on racism and contain damage from comments King made to The New York Times questioning why white supremacy is considered offensive.
The punishment came on a day when King’s own party leadership moved against him, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggesting King find “another line of work” and Sen. Mitt Romney saying he should quit. In an attempt to be proactive, the House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats in the face of proposed Democratic resolutions to censure King this week.
Those measures will force Republicans to take a stand on whether to go along with the House Democratic majority’s attempt to publicly reprimand one of their own.
Speaking to reporters Monday night after the congressional Republicans acted, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the party leader in the House, said he was not ruling out supporting a censure or reprimand resolution against King. He said the Republicans are not removing King from the GOP House conference itself so he can still attend its party meetings.
“I think voters have that decision to make. But I think we spoke loud and clear that we will not tolerate this in the Republican Party,” said McCarthy, who conferred privately with King for an hour on Monday afternoon.
McCarthy called a special meeting of the Republican Steering Committee to consider removing King from Judiciary — which has jurisdiction over immigration, voting rights and impeachment — and Agriculture, which is a prized committee for Iowans. King also lost his seat on the Small Business Committee.
King has been an ally of President Donald Trump on the border wall and other issues.
In an interview with The Times published Thursday, King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
King defended himself in a House speech Friday, saying he was raising a historical question about language, and that he was “simply an American nationalist.”