Given Rep. Steve King’s well-documented history of being a racist and a fascist sympathizer, you’d think that the GOP could do better than stripping him of his committee assignments when it’s politically convenient, and that Congress could do better than targeting him with a resolution so weak that even King himself voted for it. To hear King talk about it, though, what’s happening to him is basically equivalent to full-fledged persecution.
King went on the St. Louis-based radio show The Ed Martin Movement, the eponymous show hosted by the president of the Eagle Forum (yes, the Phyllis Schlafly thing), on Tuesday to defend himself and flail wildly at everyone he thinks has wronged him.
“My life the last few days going through this...it’s kind of like when I wake up in the morning the bad dream starts, and when I go to sleep at night, that’s when the bad dream ends,” King told Martin. “That’s how perverse it is.” This is the kind of thing you say when a tragedy happens.
King continued, taking a shot at both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney, the new chair of the House Republican Conference:
[McCarthy] decided he’s going to to believe the New York Times over Steve King and that’s a fact.
[...]
I think that now we have this resolution out of the way, now some things will cook and turn over and we’ll see what’s happening. We’re getting a lot of support from the district, they’re starting to realize what Kevin McCarthy did. And I will tell you, if there’s support out there for Liz Cheney–you can’t put her in the category of ever being a conservative again. She’s called for my resignation, she’s been here two years. What would give her the moral authority or the intellectual judgement to do something like that?
King wasn’t done, however, and by Wednesday, he was fundraising off of his own racism with the following campaign email to supporters, according to Des Moines, IA, NBC affiliate WHO:
...HARD.
King’s likely going to need all of the money he can get, considering Iowa state Senator Randy Feenstra is set to primary him next year. His seat is also likely to be targeted by Democrats in 2020 after Democratic challenger J.D. Scholten gave King the closest race of his congressional career.
By Wednesday night, King was in better spirits. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a giant in the Iowa Republican Party, refused to condemn King in an interview with WHO, and King giddily told a Fox News reporter that a censure vote is “just not gonna happen.” And when the Fox News reporter asked “if they all got it wrong about the comments you made”—a hardball question if I’ve ever heard one—King responded, “You know that to be fact, so does the record.”
It’s not all good news for King, though. Democratic congressman Bobby Rush, who was the only member of Congress to vote against the resolution because he wanted King to be censured instead, told Fox News that if King “says one more syllable that is racist,” he’ll be ready. “There is a provision that if Steve King utters one more racist thing, I have the right to bring it up again,” Rush told Fox. Knowing Steve King, it’s only a matter of time.