Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Tuesday weighed in on the battle between Donald Trump and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), saying that the civil rights icon has not contributed anything since the civil rights era.
“I’ve served with John Lewis now for quite some time,” King said of Lewis on WHO Iowa radio’s “Mickelson in the Morning,” according to a clip surfaced by CNN. “I don’t know that we’ve ever found ourselves where we’ve been working together on legislation in that way. But I have long contemplated the idea of just going to the floor and saying, ‘John Lewis, thank you for your contribution to civil rights during the civil rights era. I would appreciate it if you would contribute something since then. It’s been a half a century.’ And a number of us have watched that and said, ‘He trades off of it.’ I guess that’s fine. But he should be doing some other things too. And I haven’t seen it happen from him.”
King then said that Congressional Black Caucus is “self-segregating.”
“When they formed the Congressional Black Caucus back years ago, in the aftermath or in the beginning of the civil rights movement, the shape of that, I looked at that even then and I thought, ‘How can you form a caucus that’s established on race?’ But they did and they got away with it because people didn’t want it challenged. And now, the Congressional Black Caucus, I just openly say, they’re the self-segregating caucus,” the Republican congressman said. “I mean, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., as yesterday we celebrated his birthday, wasn’t about segregation, it was about desegregation. But now they self-segregate and use the vehicle they created that’s the self-segregating caucus in order to advance a leftist political agenda that is not at all reflective of Martin Luther King’s memory.”
