Wednesday on Capitol Hill at her weekly press briefing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she had hoped Republican lawmakers would have voted for the House resolution condemning President Donald Trump’s tweets about the so-called “The Squad,” made up of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Pelosi said, “Well the fact that this is was a resolution of the House and not some legislation as you go to Senate and be signed by the president and it was for us to say and by the way, in the most gentle way you have no idea the provisions that some people want to have in their resolutions. This is benign, and it condemns the words of the president, not the president but the words of the president and doing, so it anchored itself in the words of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, beautiful speech by Ronald Reagan, which I referenced all the time. You would thought that benign approach may have.”
She continued, “But when you say, ‘Were you surprised or were you disappointed?,’ my expectations are not great, but you always hope they might do the right thing and say that that language that the President used was underneath the dignity of the President and the people who he’s criticizing. And by the way, we were offended that he spoke in such a way about members of Congress, but we are offended that he says that about people across the country all the time, ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And that, by its definition, those words are racism. You can go look at AP and other places where they define certain words, that’s what that is. But we weren’t saying he was racist; we were saying that the words that he used were racist. So that was as gentle as it could be, considering the inappropriateness and the disgusting nature of what the President said. So we did what our members wanted us to do and had a very strong 100% vote.”
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