House GOP leaders punish King for his racially charged comments
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 multiple Democratic resolutions to censure King that are being introduced 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 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 King 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 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. The steering committee vote was unanimous.
King, who has been an ally of President Donald Trump on the border wall and other issues, has a long history of making racist remarks and demeaning comments about immigrants, but rarely drew rebukes from Republican leaders in Washington and Iowa. In November, top Iowa Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley endorsed King for reelection even after a House Republican denounced him as a white supremacist.
But in an interview with The Times published Thursday, King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
Republican officials quickly turned on him, but the party also came in for criticism from the Senate’s lone black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. He noted that the GOP has long remained silent in the face of racist comments.
“Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism — it is because of our silence when things like this are said,” Scott wrote in a Washington Post opinion column.
The scramble to condemn King also illustrated how alarmed senior Republicans are about the party’s image just two months after they lost 40 House seats, most of them in suburban or diverse districts — including seven in McCarthy’s home state of California.
But Republicans’ pointed criticism of a single House lawmaker was striking because of what they have tolerated from the leader of their party.
The condemnations of King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate Trump’s frequent offensive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and other minorities.
Just last week, the president used the Oval Office to unleash a blistering assault on immigrants in the country illegally, portraying them as criminals in a fashion that harkened back to an earlier era of American politics but rarely heard from a president in modern times. And on Sunday night, Trump invoked the Wounded Knee massacre of hundreds of Native Americans as an attempt to joke about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.