On Tuesday, the United States House of Representatives voted to condemn President Donald Trump’s latest stream of racist language and tweets, specifically targetting the four Democratic Congresswomen known as “The Squad.”
According to CNN, the House vote ended at 240-187, with four Republicans, and one independent, supporting all of the Democrats in the House who voted.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the members of “The Squad,” which also includes Dem. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), said that the vote was a message to children who “are wrestling with the weight of those words now coming from the President, that we hear them, we see them and we never will allow anybody to tell them that this isn’t their country.”
The vote was not without drama, however, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being slammed for using the word “racist” in her strong, vocal condemnation of the President’s language.
“Every single member of this institution should join us in condemning the president’s racist tweets,” Pelosi said. “To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.”
The ensuing drama over her words prompted Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who had been presiding over the floor during Pelosi’s speech to slam Republicans, before throwing down his gavel and leaving his chair out of frustration.
“I had been calling balls and strikes all day and all of a sudden, let’s escalate it,” Cleaver said, according to CNN. “It’s one of those moments where you realize that people have come here for the purpose of conflict, being engaged in conflict as opposed to getting something done.”
Republicans called for Pelosi’s words to be struck from the record, because heaven forbid you call a racist a thing, a racist thing. This is apparently based on a House parliamentary rule prohibiting lawmakers from attacking the president’s character (or the characters of members and senators for that matter.) More specifically, it is apparently House rules that you cannot say that the President has made a bigoted or racist statement, CNN notes.
According to CNN, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who later took the chair, acknowledged that the House parliamentarian said that Pelosi’s comments were not in order and should not have been spoken, which led to a vote of whether her words should be removed from the record, and yet another vote as to if her speaking privileges should be reinstated for the day.
Of course, being that the House is controlled by Democrats, Pelosi’s comments stayed and she was permitted to speak on the House Floor once more.
Pelosi remained unbothered by the drama surrounding her words, standing by her earlier statements.
“Look, I stand by my statement,” Pelosi said once she left the House floor, CNN reports. “I’m proud of the attention that has been called to it because what the President said was completely inappropriate against our colleagues, but not just against them, against so many people in our country and he said to them ‘go back to where you came from.'”
Watch the entire vote, via CSPAN, below: