Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) vowed to fight his way back onto the House committees that he was removed from over controversial comments he made about white supremacy.
“It was a political lynch mob. I had to let the blood cool,” King said of the backlash he received about the comments in an interview with Politico released Wednesday. “And the blood has now cooled, and now they don’t want to be faced with the reality of what they’ve done.”
{mosads}House Republican leaders stripped King from all of his committee assignments in January after he faced bipartisan criticism for questioning why the terms “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization” became offensive.
King had been a member of the House Judiciary, Agriculture and Small Business committees. He had also served as chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice in the last Congress and could have served as its ranking member under the new Democratic majority.
“They think if they can keep the subject tamped down, that eventually it goes away. But each day that goes by, my patience gets thinner and thinner. And that means, then, that I have to turn this up,” King told the outlet.
“I don’t want this to be the only thing I do in this Congress,” he added, “but it is something I will not let go of.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) stood during a GOP conference meeting on Tuesday morning and called on his colleagues to reinstate King to the House Agriculture and Judiciary committees, Politico noted.
Sources in the room told the outlet that not a single lawmaker acknowledged Norman’s call and the group quickly carried on.
The Iowa Republican sparked controversy again last week by saying that treating all cultures as equal is a way of “devaluing” the U.S.’s Founding Fathers.
“If we presume that every culture is equal and has an equal amount to contribute to our civilization, then we’re devaluing the contributions of the people that laid the foundation for America and that’s our Founding Fathers,” King said Tuesday, according to the Des Moines Register.