WASHINGTON _ Steve King is going to vote "yes" on a resolution meant to be a rebuke from his colleagues to disapprove of the Iowa Republican's racist comments.
"I'm putting up a yes on the board here because what you say is true, is right and is just," he said on the House floor Tuesday.
The House will vote Tuesday evening on the resolution, which states that the body rejects white nationalism and white supremacy as "hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States."
The measure, sponsored by Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, was taken up under suspension of the rules, a fast-track process that requires two-thirds support.
On Jan. 10, King was quoted in The New York Times as asking, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization _ how did that language become offensive?"
The disapproval vote was not the first, and perhaps not the final, reprimand for the congressman.
King was punished by his own party Monday night, when the Republican Steering Committee unanimously decided not to seat him on any committees for the 116th Congress.
There are two measures to censure King pending in the House, offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby L. Rush of Illinois and Tim Ryan of Ohio. Censure, which amounts to a vote and a public shaming, is the chamber's most stringent form of punishment, short of expulsion.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has until Wednesday afternoon to decide when to take up those measures.
Rush will not vote for the disapproval measure, which he called "shallow." "This resolution just restates the obvious. It does not address Steve King's violent, vitriolic, and rabid racism," Rush said.
A decision has not yet been made about how to handle the pending censure resolutions, according to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer. "I personally have no problem voting for the censure, and we're going to be talking about it," the Maryland Democrat said.
Hoyer suggested that the seriousness of censure is what the caucus is weighing as it decides how to proceed with those resolutions.
He drew a comparison between King's actions and words to the last House member who faced a censure, Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel. The House censured Rangel in 2010 after he was found to have misused federal resources, failed to pay taxes on a rental property and filed inaccurate financial disclosure forms. King's behavior "far exceeds" that, Hoyer said.
"What King is doing and what others have done is to encourage the undermining of the basic principles of our country," Hoyer said. "In my opinion that is a more dangerous phenomena than anything Charlie Rangel did."
If it comes to censure, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks hopes that the effort would be led by House Republicans.
"I'm saying that they should do it themselves. They should do it. They should be the ones to say 'we can't tolerate this within our party. This will eat up at us like a cancer,'" the New York Democrat said Tuesday.
