Alice Ollstein contributed reporting.
As he was leaving President Trump’s first State of the Union on Tuesday evening, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that the Congressional Black Caucus “took a knee nearly all night.”
“I think the best study in this thing is who didn’t stand,” he told TPM. “The Congressional Black Caucus took a knee nearly all night. When he spoke about our flag and honoring our flag, they took a knee. There were two or three of those spots along the way, they didn’t react to hardly anything. It was like ‘we are going to be the resistance.'”
This isn’t the first time that King has made charged comments about the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2014, he observed that there “is no ‘Congressional White Caucus'” and described the CBC as “a self-segregated caucus and it is a caucus that they drive an agenda that’s based on race. And they’re always looking to place the race card. They’re always looking to divide people down that line.”
He’s also come under fire for other racially charged remarks, including saying last year that “Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before” outnumbering white Americans, and tweeting that the right-wing, anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
