The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a resolution that condemned anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry against minorities as “hateful expressions of intolerance” —…
The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a resolution that condemned anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry against minorities as “hateful expressions of intolerance” — as rattled Democrats tried to quell a festering controversy over anti-Semitism.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had hammered out the details of the resolution after chaos erupted in her own caucus over freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments about Israel’s influence on US policymakers.
The final vote was 407 in favor and 23 opposed.
All the no votes came from Republicans, including New York Reps. Peter King, Chris Collins and Lee Zeldin.
Iowa GOP Rep, Steve King, who was stripped of his committees earlier for comments backing white nationalism, voted present.
“We are condemning anti-Semitism, anti-Islamophobia [sic] and we are condemning white supremacy. Our country has no place for this,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference before the vote.
But Democrats kept arguing over specific language in the document, and a vote scheduled for 3:15 p.m. finally began about 90 minutes later.
After the delay, a revised resolution was unveiled that had only nine more words than the 1,301-word original.
Even though Omar was responsible for the entire contentious episode, Pelosi defended her, saying she didn’t believe the freshman Minnesota lawmaker was an anti-Semite after she suggested that some US politicians had divided loyalties because they accepted money from pro-Israel lobbyists, a longtime trope.
“I feel confident that her words were not based on any anti-Semitic attitude, but that she didn’t have a full appreciation of how they landed on other people where these words have a history and a cultural impact that might have been unknown to her,” said Pelosi.
Some Democrats questioned why the original resolution condemning bigotry against Jews was expanded to cover just about every other conceivable group.
