King Blasts House GOP Leadership for ‘Unprincipled Reaction’

U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on Friday took to the House floor to blast House GOP leadership for their “unprincipled reaction” to what he calls an “orchestrated media firestorm” over his remarks to the New York Times that led to House GOP leadership stripping him of his committee assignments over one year ago.

During an interview with the New York Times reporter King asked, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

King told Caffeinated Thoughts at the time that he was taken out of context and his comments were mischaracterized.

Still without committee assignments he urged that the matter be rectified.

“[Saint Paul] stood before Festus, the Governor, and said ‘if I’ve offended thee, for any reason for which I should be put to death, tell me what that is. Show me your rule, show me your law. And if you have no law, you have no way to punish me for some law that doesn’t exist.’ Those principles are in our law today. They’re not, Madame Speaker, necessarily in the rules of the Republican Conference. I can tell you that, as none of those things were allowed for me,” he said.

“I didn’t have and wasn’t presented any right to face my accusers. In fact, I don’t have an accuser. Not one out of 330 Million people. And there’s no rule that I have been cited as violating, or even thinking about circumventing, let alone, violate a law,” he added.

“It was an orchestrated media firestorm that got the political lynch-mobs blood up, and they decided the best way to do that was to do what they did. And it’s got to be rectified, Madame Speaker. We cannot have a standard in this country, a standard in this country that says that one person in leadership, or even if that one person can demagogue the rest of them, can diminish or deny the representation of a duly elected Member of Congress. But that is what’s happened, and it must be rectified, and it must be rectified soon,” he concluded.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has not indicated when King would be reassigned to committees or what he would do should King win re-election.

The lack of committee assignments has been a point of criticism for King’s opponents in June’s Republican primary in the Iowa 4th Congressional District.