House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) claimed on Tuesday that Republicans “never disrespected” the office of the President when Barack Obama was in charge.
During a press conference with GOP leadership, Scalise complained about Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s (D-MA) refusal to call President Donald Trump the president, preferring instead to call him “the occupant.”
“Look, we disagreed with Barack Obama on a lot of things that he did. The policies,” Scalise said. “As our conference chair laid out, there are a lot of policies that we have disagreements on with Speaker Pelosi and her socialist Democrats, just like we had disagreements with a lot of Barack Obama’s policies, but we never disrespected the office.”
“I called him President of the United States, as we all did. If he asked us to go meet with him at the White House, we went,” he continued. “We expressed our disagreements in a respectful way.”
Scalise apparently forgot the infamous moments when former Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted “You lie!” at Obama in the middle of a joint session of Congress, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) declaring that the “single most important thing” for the GOP to achieve is making Obama a “one-term president,” and the many congressional Republicans either openly touting Trump’s birther conspiracy theory or declining to reject it.
Watch Scalise below:
Rep. Steve Scalise claims GOP "never disrespected the office" when Obama was president pic.twitter.com/Hk8UO0gIAq
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) July 16, 2019
