Omar tweets Jew hate: Pelosi House yawns about anti-Semitism 'around the world.' Trump tweets 'go back': 'RACIST'
Tuesday night, after Nancy Pelosi was ruled out of order and subsequently shielded from House rules by her fellow Democrats, the House of Representatives voted to condemn President Trump's recent tweets about four far-left House freshmen as racist.
But how did this resolution differ from the light tap on the wrist that one of those four freshmen, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., got for her openly anti-Semitic comments earlier this year?
Let's take a look.
First, there's the timing. Trump's tweets happened over the weekend, Congress came back into town on Monday, House leadership announced a resolution later that day, and the resolution was passed after structured debate (and a fight about decorum) on Tuesday evening.
Back when House Democrats had to face up to disciplining one of their own over anti-Semitic tropes and slurs earlier this year, we saw multiple days of hemming and hawing until the chamber eventually voted on a watered-down resolution that didn't even mention Omar by name. Oh, and it went through a committee on which the member being "disciplined" sat.
In fact, that resolution was so watered down that House Democrats could just as easily have used the same language to denounce Trump's comments, given that it was aimed at "bigotry against all minorities" instead of one member's anti-Semitic comments. It took about the same level of moral courage needed to declare that the sky is blue or that water is wet and was aptly denounced as "a sham cover vote designed to avoid dealing with a rogue member.”
By contrast, the House's resolution this week did mention Trump by name. But instead of fully quoting what he said, the language quoted three whole words of what he said, House Judiciary Ranking Member Doug Collins pointed out on the floor, and "substitutes its own phrasings and editorializing."
If it wasn't already obvious enough that both of these House resolutions were nakedly political affairs, the comparison ought to more than confirm it.
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