The punishment came on a day when King’s own party leadership moved against him, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggesting King find “another line of work” and Sen. Mitt Romney saying he should quit. In an attempt to be proactive, the House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats in the face of multiple Democratic resolutions to censure King that are being introduced this week.
Those measures will force Republicans to take a stand on whether to go along with the House Democratic majority’s attempt to publicly reprimand one of their own.
Speaking to reporters Monday night after the congressional Republicans acted, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the party leader in the House, said he was not ruling out supporting a censure or reprimand resolution against King. He said the Republicans are not removing King from the GOP House conference itself so he can still attend its party meetings.
“I think voters have that decision to make. But I think we spoke loud and clear that we will not tolerate this in the Republican Party,” said McCarthy, who conferred privately with King for an hour Monday afternoon.
McCarthy called a special meeting of the Republican Steering Committee to consider removing King from Judiciary — which has jurisdiction over immigration, voting rights and impeachment — and Agriculture, which is a prized committee for Iowans. King also lost his seat on the Small Business Committee. The steering committee vote was unanimous.
King, who has been an ally of President Donald Trump on the border wall and other issues, has a long history of making racist remarks and demeaning comments about immigrants, but rarely drew rebukes from Republican leaders in Washington and Iowa. In November, top Iowa Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley endorsed King for re-election even after a House Republican denounced him as a white supremacist.
But in an interview with The Times published Thursday, King said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
Republican officials quickly turned on him, but the party also came in for criticism from the Senate’s lone black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. He noted that the GOP has long remained silent in the face of racist comments.
“Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism — it is because of our silence when things like this are said,” Scott wrote in a Washington Post opinion column.
The scramble to condemn King also illustrated how alarmed senior Republicans are about the party’s image just two months after they lost 40 House seats, most of them in suburban or diverse districts — including seven in McCarthy’s home state of California, where the GOP is on the brink of extinction.
But Republicans’ pointed criticism of a single House lawmaker was striking because of what they have tolerated from the leader of their party.
The condemnations of King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate Trump’s frequent offensive and insensitive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and other minorities.
Just last week, the president used the Oval Office to unleash a blistering assault on immigrants in the country illegally, portraying them as criminals in a fashion that harkened back to an earlier era of American politics but rarely heard from a president in modern times. And on Sunday night, Trump invoked the Wounded Knee massacre of hundreds of Native Americans as an attempt to joke about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
“I’m glad that they are finally taking action after all of these years of Steve King slandering immigrants and Hispanics, but the president of the United States is also doing that and he just said something about Elizabeth Warren a few evenings ago that was also racially ugly and we haven’t heard a word of condemnation from anyone in the Republican Party about that,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas.
Congressional Republicans have continued to embrace the president and his hard-line immigration politics, averting their gaze from his inflammatory rhetoric out of fear their core voters will punish them if they stray from Trump.
One person withholding criticism of King was Trump. When asked by reporters Monday about the furor over King’s remarks, Trump said, “I haven’t been following it.”
Republicans are now trying to get ahead of a fast-moving political problem while the country is in the midst of a lengthy government shutdown over a border wall by Trump, who in many ways patterned his immigration policies and rhetoric on those of King.
On Sunday, McCarthy promised that “action will be taken” against King and said of the Iowan’s remarks, “That language has no place in America.”
McConnell said Monday that King’s remarks were “unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position.”
“If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work,” McConnell said.
But it is not clear what, if any, additional steps congressional Republican leaders will take with King. The National Republican Congressional Committee indicated Monday that they were not ready to step away from him.
“The NRCC does not get involved in primaries and isn’t going to comment on a hypothetical general election two years away,” said Chris Pack, a spokesman for the House campaign arm.
Democrats are moving to censure or reprimand the Iowa congressman, a stinging penalty. A senior Democratic member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bobby L. Rush of Illinois, announced Monday that he would introduce a resolution to censure King over a history of “rabid, racist remarks.”
“Republicans, in the interest of political expediency, sought his endorsement, ignored his racist remarks, and continued to elevate him to positions of influence,” Rush said. “Only now that his behavior is well known to those outside the beltway and tainted him politically, do they vigorously denounce him.”
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, introduced another censure resolution Monday and in an interview said Reps. David Joyce, R-Ohio, and Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, had agreed to co-sponsor the measure.
“It is really important for us as a body, as a country, to be very clear, very forceful, to condemn these comments and hopefully stop this from happening again,” Ryan said. “This is not the kind of behavior and conversation that we want to be having here in the United States in 2019.”
Democratic leaders in the House have yet to say what they will do with the competing censure resolutions, but are inclined to allow a vote of some sort related to King’s remarks, according to one senior Democratic aide.
King defended himself in a House speech Friday, saying he was raising a historical question about language, and that he was “simply an American nationalist.”
In the interview with The Times, King also reflected on the record number of minorities and women in the new Democratic-controlled House. “You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men,” he said.
King’s hard-line immigration policies and demeaning comments about Hispanics foreshadowed Trump’s nativist rhetoric in his 2016 campaign, in his two years in the White House and during the government shutdown over a border wall. The president once boasted to King that he raised more money for him than anyone else, King recalled in the Times article, which traced how the Iowa congressman helped write the playbook for white identity politics that dominate the Republican Party under Trump.
He has already drawn one serious primary opponent, state Sen. Randy Feenstra, for the 2020 campaign and some high-profile Republicans have indicated in recent days that they will not embrace his re-election.
“It does open the door for other individuals to take a look,” Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa said in a television interview last week of King’s closer-than-expected victory last year, noting that she had told him: “You need to decide whether you want to represent the values of the 4th district or do something else.”
Reynolds said she was staying out of the primary “right now,” but multiple Iowa Republicans said the state’s senior elected officials were unlikely to endorse King again and would wait until there is more clarity in the primary field before rallying to one of his GOP challengers. Other Western Iowa Republicans are expected to challenge King, who has fended off primaries before but did so with the support of his party and its top leaders.
In addition to Reynolds’ criticism, Iowa Republican chair Jeff Kaufmann said the state party would “remain neutral” in King’s primary.
Also, Iowa’s two Republican senators, Grassley and Joni Ernst, along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who had appointed King a co-chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign, all rebuked King in recent days.
All had eagerly embraced him in the past because of his standing with the state’s most conservative voters — keys to winning statewide elections in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest.
Grassley had endorsed King in November for re-election, even after the chairman of the House Republican election committee denounced King as a white supremacist.
“Iowa needs Steve King in Congress,” Grassley said in that endorsement. “I also need Steve King in Congress.”
Ernst, who faces re-election in 2020, appeared with King at a rally in his district the Monday before Election Day last year, after he had endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.
King sits on the Judiciary, Small Business and Agriculture committees, and on a subcommittee on immigration and border security. Before Republicans lost their House majority in the midterm elections, he was chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.