In a remarkable political repudiation, the Democratic-led US House of Representatives voted to condemn US President Donald Trump’s “racist comments” against four members of color, despite protestations by Trump’s Republican congressional allies and his own insistence that he does not have “a racist bone in my body.”
Two days after Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen in their first term as lawmakers should “go back” to their home countries — although all are citizens and three were born in the US — Democrats muscled the resolution through the chamber by a 240-187 vote over near-solid Republican opposition.
The rebuke on Tuesday was an embarrassing one for Trump, even though it carries no legal repercussions — but if anything his latest harangues should help him with his die-hard conservative base.
Photo: AFP
Despite a lobbying effort by Trump and party leaders for a unified Republican front, four party members voted to condemn his remarks: moderate US representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Fred Upton, Will Hurd and Susan Brooks, who is retiring.
Also backing the measure was US Representative Justin Amash, an independent who this month left the Republican Party after becoming the party’s sole member of the US Congress to back a Trump impeachment inquiry.
Democrats saved one of the day’s most passionate moments until near the end.
“I know racism when I see it,” said US Representative John Lewis, whose skull was fractured at the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. “At the highest level of government, there’s no room for racism.”
Before the showdown roll call, Trump characteristically plunged forward with time-tested insults as he accused his four outspoken critics of “spewing some of the most vile, hateful and disgusting things ever said by a politician,” adding: “If you hate our Country, or if you are not happy here, you can leave!” — echoing taunts long unleashed against political dissidents rather than opposing parties’ lawmakers.
The president was joined by US House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans in trying to redirect the focus from Trump’s original tweets, which for three days have consumed Washington and drawn widespread condemnation.
Instead, they tried playing offense by accusing the four women — among the Democrats’ most left-leaning members and ardent Trump critics — of socialism, an accusation that is already a central theme of the Republican’s presidential and congressional campaigns for next year’s elections.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Trump’s four targets, returned his fire.
“You’re right, Mr. President — you don’t have a racist bone in your body. You have a racist mind in your head and a racist heart in your chest,” she tweeted.
The four-page Democratic resolution said that the House “strongly condemns [US] President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
It said that Trump’s slights “do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America.”
All but goading Republicans, the resolution included a full page of remarks by former US president Ronald Reagan, who is revered by the Republicans.
Reagan said in 1989 that if the US shut its doors to newcomers “our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Tuesday’s faceoff came after years of Democrats bristling over anti-immigrant and racially incendiary pronouncements by Trump.
Those include his kicking off his 2016 US presidential campaign by proclaiming many Mexican migrants to be criminals and asserting there were “fine people” on both sides at a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly.
At the US Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch on Tuesday, Trump’s tweets came up and some lawmakers were finding the situation irksome, participants said.
Many want the campaigns for next year’s elections to focus on progressive Democrats’ demands for government-provided healthcare, abolishing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and other hard-left policies.
“Those ideas give us so much material to work with and it takes away from our time to talk about it,” US Senator Mike Braun said of Trump’s tweets.
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