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The House “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new citizens and people of color.”
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Tuesday to condemn President Donald Trump for "racist comments" against four Democratic congresswomen, a symbolic vote aimed at shaming Trump and his fellow Republicans who stood by him.
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The four-page Democratic resolution said the House “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new citizens and people of color.”
Tempers flared in the hours leading up to the vote that mainly split along party lines, the culmination of three days of outrage sparked by a Trump tweetstorm that diverted attention from all other business in Washington.
The head of state had told the group of congresswomen to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came." All four lawmakers - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan - are U.S. citizens.
Three of these high-profile left-wing politicians were born in the U.S. with Omar being the only one who arrived in the country as a child after her family fled as refugees Somalia's civil war in 1997, to later become a U.S. citizen in 2000.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has struggled at times to work with the progressive newcomers in her caucus, staunchly defended them in the debate. "These comments from the White House are disgraceful, disgusting, and racist," the House Speaker said.
Pelosi's comments put the House into a two-hour limbo after Republicans argued she went too far in her comments and broke debate rules.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized Democrats for remarks that upset the "order and decency" of the chamber, saying that "today is the day that historians will write about." He had urged his colleagues to vote against the measure. Four Republicans joined the Democrats to support the measure.
Yet this is not the first time for Trump, who has a history of what critics consider race-baiting.
He led a movement that falsely claimed former Democratic President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and said after a deadly, white supremacist-led rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the incident.
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