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Steve King’s Comments Prompt House Vote Condemning White Supremacy Republicans Rebuke Steve King but Face Vexing Question: Why Not Sooner?
(about 3 hours later)
The House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a resolution condemning white supremacy by a vote of 424-1, reflecting the anger in both parties over comments by Representative Steve King of Iowa questioning why white supremacy is considered offensive. WASHINGTON — By the time a Republican challenged Representative Steve King of Iowa in the 2016 party primary, Mr. King had already courted far-right foreign leaders, proposed electric wiring atop a border wall to treat illegal immigrants like straying livestock, and said young migrants had “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
The resolution begins by citing Mr. King’s remarks to The New York Times: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” It says that white supremacy and white nationalism are “contrary to the ideals of the United States of America,” and details the increase in racist hate crimes over recent years. But in that race Mr. King had the help of fellow Republicans like the then-Gov. Terry Branstad and Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst. Each of those Iowa Republicans overlooked Mr. King’s history of racist remarks and divisive conduct — well before his recent comments about “white supremacy” — and backed Mr. King’s re-election in the state’s most heavily conservative district.
The resolution also cites recent deadly shootings by white supremacists in South Carolina and Pennsylvania, attacks that targeted black worshipers and Jewish congregants, respectively. Mr. King won handily.
Mr. King, a Republican, took the House floor to say he would vote in support of the resolution. “They didn’t care too much about Steve King — it was about the primary voters Steve King represents,” said the former state senator Rick Bertrand, the G.O.P. challenger in that race.
The action was part of a still-evolving response that began to take form Monday when House Republican leaders voted to remove Mr. King, now serving his ninth term, from his committee assignments, including the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He described the support for Mr. King as an act of “self-preservation” by Republican politicians who did not want to cross the hard-line voters in Western Iowa’s conservative heartland. “But now the reality is we may actually lose the seat, so Steve has finally fired Steve,” Mr. Bertrand said.
[Read about how House Republicans removed Steve King from several powerful committees] One day after House G.O.P. leaders stripped Mr. King of his committee assignments, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican, pushed him toward the exits, Iowa Republicans began a “super PAC” aimed at unseating him in 2020 and Ms. Ernst said voters in Iowa would make “the correct choice moving forward” about Mr. King, it was becoming clear that the nine-term lawmaker may finally be facing the ultimate political consequence for his remarks.
The resolution was brought by Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic House Majority Whip. “It’s racist, we do not support it or agree with it, and I think he should find another line of work,” Ms. Cheney told reporters Tuesday, going even further than the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, about Mr. King’s comment to The Times: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
“I want to ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, let’s vote for this resolution,” Mr. King said on the House floor. “I’m putting up a yes on the board here because what you say here is right and is true and is just, and so is what I have stated here on the floor of the House.” The House also voted nearly unanimously on Tuesday to endorse a resolution that rejected white nationalism and white supremacy as “hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.” Even though it was aimed at the Iowa Republican, the broadly worded resolution was less than some lawmakers wanted to bring up, and even Mr. King spoke in favor of it.
Mr. King maintains that his remarks to The Times were taken out of context. However, he has a long public history of demonizing immigrants and bemoaning the replacement of white culture — a bedrock principle of white nationalist and white supremacist ideology. Representative Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat, wanted to formally censure Mr. King and drafted a measure to do just that.
[Steve King has a history of making racist remarks. Read them and more here] “My resolution lets Steve King know if he continues this type of behavior, then the next level would be expulsion for him,” Mr. Rush said.
Other measures in the House related to Mr. King are still currently unresolved. Democrats have moved to formally censure the Iowa Representative, which would be only the 24th time that disciplinary action had ever been used in the House. The confluence of his closer-than-expected re-election, the devastating losses House Republicans suffered with educated and minority voters in November and the blunt-force nature of what he does not deny saying has made Mr. King toxic in his party’s caucus.
Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois cast the lone vote against the resolution, saying it was not strong enough and that “anything short of a censure” is shallow. Yet even as it became clear that his fate may be sealed, many Democrats and, more quietly, some Republicans were wondering why he survived as long as he has given his 15-year record of making what were at a minimum racially provocative comments.
“We need to be clear to the American people that we use condemnation to express our disapproval of those not in the House,” Mr. Rush said in a statement. “We use censure for those in the House.” His drift toward nativism may have seemed of little consequence when he was a junior lawmaker in George W. Bush-era Washington and Republicans were more sympathetic to immigration.
But no other member of Congress has so aggressively sought to develop relationships with white nationalist groups abroad, and those groups became empowered at about the same time the then-candidate Donald J. Trump was making a hard line on immigration his signature issue.
As a result, Mr. King’s inflammatory remarks have gained more attention — both because of how they reflect on him and how they cast a brighter light on Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
Some congressional Republicans saw the path Mr. King was on: Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, the chairman of the House campaign arm last year, surprised some in the party by speaking out against Mr. King shortly before the election. Mr. Stivers called Mr. King’s conduct “completely inappropriate” and said “we must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms.”
Still, for the most part, G.O.P. officials looked the other way or offered one-off condemnations of Mr. King as his flirtation with nationalist figures like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands deepened and he made increasingly incendiary remarks about, for example, the impossibility of sustaining “civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
The tolerance or Mr. King’s conduct — and he did seem emboldened by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party — stands in contrast to how an earlier generation of Republicans addressed public displays of racial bigotry or racial insensitivity. Bigots like the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke were shunned by party officials, and when the former Senate majority leader Trent Lott used Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party to seemingly praise segregation, it cost him his leadership post.
So why would Republicans wait until Mr. King flatly defended white supremacy to punish him?
“I haven’t been following every utterance of Congressman King. I certainly followed this one, and I think the House Republican conference did the right thing,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, told reporters Tuesday.
Asked the same question, Mr. McCarthy shot back: “Have I been leader for years?”
He said he had been the House Republican for only “a short amount of time” and was now “in a position to take action.”
But one former adviser to the last Republican leader, the former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, pointedly noted on Tuesday that Mr. McCarthy and Steve Scalise, his second-in-command, were not as vocal as Mr. Ryan when it came to Mr. King’s eruptions.
Of course, Mr. Ryan never sought to punish Mr. King as severely as Mr. McCarthy did Monday.
Former aides to Mr. Ryan and John A. Boehner, another former House speaker, said both admonished Mr. King, but noted that he was a backbencher of little consequence in the Capitol and argued that he had not said anything nearly as incendiary as what he did last week.
“Along with public pushback, Paul admonished King directly several times about his behavior,” said AshLee Strong, who was a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan. “These latest comments warrant harsh consequences, and he believes McCarthy did the right thing by booting him.”
David Schnittger, a former aide to Mr. Boehner, recalled that his ex-boss called Mr. King’s comments about young migrants smuggling marijuana “deeply offensive and wrong” and pointed out that the then-speaker had privately used an obscenity to describe Mr. King in the aftermath of those remarks.
Another former aide to Mr. Boehner, Michael Steel, said Mr. King’s behavior had reached “a tipping point” but conceded that congressional Republicans also face a political imperative.
“If you’re going to win back the majority by winning suburban districts in places like California and New Jersey, it’s important to take a firm line against this sort of thing,” Mr. Steel said.
But he said publicly what many Republicans say privately: that excommunicating Mr. King will matter little if Mr. Trump is the nominee in 2020.
“Whatever we do on Steve King is on the margins compared to what the president says and does,” Mr. Steel said.
In Iowa, Mr. King’s longtime supporters said they felt that he was unfairly treated by the media and that the warm and engaging lawmaker they saw in the largely rural district was nothing like the caricature they read about.
But after defeating a little-known Democrat by only just over three percentage points and increasingly shifting his attention from the soybean rows and hog processing plants around Sioux City to the fringe nationalist politics in other countries, Mr. King’s defenders started to lose their patience.
“Who cares who the mayor of Toronto is when you’re from northwest Iowa?” said Mark Lundberg, the former chairman of the Sioux County Republican Party, alluding to Mr. King’s endorsement last fall of Faith Goldy, a white-nationalist candidate in Canada’s largest city. “It was just a constant.”
While calling Mr. King “a good guy,” Mr. Lundberg said that he crossed a line with his comments on white supremacy and that it was time for the district to rally behind a candidate “without all the controversy.”
Echoing Mr. Bertrand, Mr. Lundberg acknowledged that there was “great concern” in the party about how close Mr. King’s re-election was — leaving little doubt that what is partly driving the calculation to nudge him out is that he may imperil the party’s hold on what is otherwise a safe Republican seat.
Republicans there have created a super PAC called Iowa Four, named after the district, to target Mr. King, according to an Iowa Republican involved with the planning. And the conservative Club for Growth PAC has made inquiries in the state about finding a potential alternative to the incumbent.
Mr. King already has two Republican opponents, and Mr. Bertrand did not rule out another bid.
“The day of reckoning has come, and now it is just a matter of how the story ends,” crowed Nick Ryan, an Iowa Republican strategist who has long sought to oust Mr. King.
For the first time since 1899, Mr. Ryan noted, Iowa does not have a member on the House Agriculture Committee.
And two of Iowa’s largest newspapers, The Des Moines Register and The Sioux City Journal, each published an editorial Tuesday urging Mr. King to resign.
But he has given no indication that he will resign. He said on the House floor Tuesday that he “understands and recognizes the gravity of this issue” and insisted that he rejects white supremacy.
But his critics in Iowa were already testing out their attacks, suggesting voters would not return a lawmaker to office who is too controversial to even serve on any committees.
“He has been rendered impotent,” Mr. Bertrand said. “The national folks are forcing the local hand.”