The House voted on a resolution condemning President Trump’s tweet telling four minority freshmen Democrats to “go back” to where they came from.
The measure passed 240-187, with just four Republican votes and the backing of one independent, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who left the GOP earlier this month because he dislikes Trump.
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The measure, authored by Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, condemns “racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should ‘go back’ to other countries, by referring to immigrants and asylum seekers as ‘invaders,’ and by saying that Members of Congress who are immigrants (or those of our colleagues who are wrongly assumed to be immigrants) do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America.”
The resolution does not rebuke the president directly and came after an intense debate among Democrats regarding how to punish the president over his tweet.
Some Democrats backed a measure sponsored by Democratic Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen to censure the president, an act that has not occurred since 1834 against President Andrew Jackson.
Democrats at length settled on the resolution condemning his tweet. They used the floor debate to attack the president’s comments on immigrants broadly and his tweet from last weekend about four progressive lawmakers who criticized his decision to deport illegal immigrants.
Trump in a Sunday tweet called for Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
Pelosi, in an impassioned floor speech, said Trump’s tweets, “show that he does not share those American values,” adding that “these comments from the White House are disgraceful and disgusting, and those comments are racist.”
House rules prohibit lawmakers from calling an individual a racist, and Republicans seized on Pelosi’s violation in an attempt to ban her from speaking on the floor for the remainder of the day.
The fight halted floor debate while parliamentarian Tom Wickham pored over a rules book.
At one point, the presiding lawmaker, Democratic Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, gave an impromptu, angry speech citing a lack of fairness in the actions by Republicans. He stormed off suddenly, leaving the chair briefly empty.
The parliamentarian ultimately ruled Pelosi could not use the words in her speech.
But Democrats voted to keep them on the record and to subsequently restore her floor privileges.
Republicans accused the Democrats of acting politically to attack the president. Trump has not backed down from his tweets and declared Tuesday he is not a racist.
“I know there is frustration in this body but our duty is not to focus retribution but to build a more perfect union,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
