Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Rep. Steve King Was Kicked Off House Committees Over White Nationalism. Now Some In The GOP Want Him Back.

Some Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to get Rep. Steve King back on congressional committees, months after he was kicked off them for making offensive comments about white nationalism, Politico reported Monday.

Politico named three leaders of the effort, but noted others were involved as well. “It was unfair the way it was quoted,” one of the leaders, Rep. Louie Gohmert, told Politico, referring to the January interview King did with The New York Times in which King said, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

The House voted to censure King shortly after the comments were published, and GOP leadership stripped him of his assignments on the Judiciary, Agriculture, and Small Business Committees.

The group is said to be struggling to get the 25 signatures needed to force a vote of the Republican Steering Committee on the issue.

“Steve King’s rhetoric has been a thorn in everyone’s side for years and I don’t think anyone is eager to return to the incessant headaches that lending him credibility brings,” a GOP aide told Politico. “While there may be a very small faction of his friends that want to help him out, the vast majority of Republicans know that his offensive views haven’t changed, and that those views have no place in our party.”

In the past year alone, King has retweeted a British neo-Nazi and refused to apologize for it, endorsed a white nationalist running for mayor of Toronto and met with a far-right Austrian party with Nazi ties while on a trip to Europe funded by a Holocaust memorial group.

Some of the leaders of the pro-King effort have their own controversial history. Both Gohmert and fellow King ally Rep. Paul Gosar have promoted conspiracy theories that Democratic megadonor and Holocaust survivor George Soros turned in fellow Jews to the Nazis. Gosar also claimed in 2017 that Soros-backed organizers, not white nationalists, were really behind the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.