Iowa Congressman Steve King, who came within three points of losing his seat to Democrat J.D. Scholten in 2018 after endorsing a neo-Nazi sympathizer for public office, wants to know why it became such a friggin’ bad thing to be a white supremacist. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” King told the New York Times. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
It’s amazing how we were just forced to sit through what felt like a years-long outrage about a freshman congresswoman saying motherfucker when an open white supremacist who compared immigrants to dogs and shamelessly retweets neo-Nazis has been sitting in the Republican caucus, in good standing, for years now.
Not only has King been in good standing, but while the rest of us have spent years begging Republican House leaders to hold just one fucking floor vote to protect undocumented immigrant families from deportation, they’ve been letting him run the immigration shit-show by giving him votes to deport immigrant families.
Not without blowback from others, at least. In 2018 King clung on to his seat by the slimmest margin of his electoral career, and in the final weeks of the previous congress, nearly 150 groups also called on Republican House leaders to censure King for yet another racist remark, when he called Mexican immigrants “dirt.” They did nothing.
King doesn’t just deserve to be censured; he deserves to be expelled and run out of town, but that would require a good amount of courage and votes from House Republicans. So good luck to us with that. Steve’s also picked up a 2020 primary challenger in the person of Iowa state Senator Randy Feenstra. In the meantime, Steve was John Boehner’s headache, he was Paul Ryan’s headache, and now he’ll be Kevin McCarthy’s headache.