A Missouri Republican group has disinvited Sen. Roy Blunt from speaking at a local GOP event after he voted against President Trump’s border emergency declaration.
The Christian County Republican Central Committee uninvited Blunt from its April 6 Lincoln/Trump Day dinner, the Kansas City Star reports.
The committee’s event chairwoman, Wanda Martens, wrote to Blunt in anger after he voted with 11 other Senate Republicans to revoke Trump’s emergency declaration, which the president is using to reallocate $3.6 billion in military construction money to a southern border wall project.
“I am so disappointed in you now that I can hardly speak,” Martens wrote to Blunt in an email.
Blunt is an appropriator and is the only member of the GOP leadership who voted with Democrats to revoke the declaration.
Blunt said the emergency declaration could set a precedent that would result in Democrats using the emergency declaration to implement their own agenda, such as gun control or the Green New Deal. “Those decisions should not be made without congressional action,” Blunt said.
The resolution passed and Trump vetoed it on Friday. The House will try to override the veto on March 26 but appears to lack anywhere near the approximately 50 GOP lawmakers who would be needed to block the president with a two-thirds majority.
Not everybody was happy with Martens’ decision, according to the paper.
“I think that we absolutely need to stand by the people who we send to Washington,” committee member Chuck Branch said. “We don’t have to agree on policy. Taking it to a personal level of not inviting him to a Republican event seems to be crossing a line in my view.”
Missouri favored Trump heavily in 2016. He won with 57 percent of the vote, compared to 38 percent for Hillary Clinton. In November, Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat representing the state, lost her re-election bid to Republican Josh Hawley.
