Remember Steve Scalise (R-Klan), the House Majority Whip from Louisiana who spoke at a Metarie, Louisiana conference thrown by white supremacists in 2002? Yeah, well, if you don’t, don’t feel bad, Scalise is trying very hard not to remember, too.
He started off having his office hem and haw about whether he’d actually attended said klavern rally, and then had to ‘fess up that yeah, he had actually been there and spoken, since you guys have proof and all. Step One of the Putting-Out-the-Fire-Quick process — denying the whole damn thing — never really got off the ground. Now he’s on to Step Two: denying that he actually knew that those people waving Confederate flags and baying about lynch mobs were actually white supremacists.
Credit: Photo used under CC license from Martin (Arete13) via Flickr.
He Didn’t Know
Right, Steve. This isn’t working, either. He rumbled to a New Orleans newspaper on December 29:
“For anyone to suggest that I was involved with a group like that is insulting and ludicrous. . . . When someone called and asked me to speak, I would go. If I knew today what they were about, I wouldn’t go.”
“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints. In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families. He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”
If he did speak to the organization, the aide added, he “didn’t know they were a white supremacist group.”
In 2002, Scalise only had a single staffer, the aide said, and neither one of them could be expected to figure out just who Scalise was going to talk to on a day-to-day basis. Presumably whether Scalise was asked to speak to a League of Women Voters rally or a NAMBLA function, he’d jump in his truck with his megaphone and his notebook of talking points and speak to whoever was at the venue when he got there.
It gets better. A former adviser told the Washington Post:
“It was a crazy time and I doubt there was a lot of checking up on who was who. . . . It really wasn’t until 2004 that he started sitting down and evaluating speaking engagements and questionnaires. Even then he really didn’t get a handle on [a] schedule until he ran for State Senate in 2007 and then Congress the year after.”
I’ll continue once I stop giggling.
Yes, He Did Know
We’ve already determined that everyone in Louisiana who hadn’t been in solitary confinement since the Carter era knew exactly who, and what, David Duke was. (Duke was the head of the organization EURO whom the staunch not-racist Scalise spoke to in 2002, and don’t think it was a coincidence that his topic was how lazy, shiftless blacks were being given wagonloads of tax dollars by the federal gubmint.) Duke made the news on a regular basis heiling Hitler in a store-bought Nazi uniform. He was elected to the Louisiana State Legislature. He nearly won a U.S. Senate seat, causing an outcry from both state parties. The chairman of the RNC denounced Duke in 1996, publicly labeling him a “Klansman.” But, somehow, Scalise never put one and one together and figured out that any group led by David Duke must be a racist group.
Except, yes he did. Or at least he did in 1999.
Three years before the whites-only toga party in Metarie, Scalise was a state representative — in the very same chambers Duke had occupied just a few years earlier — who was considering running for the U.S. House. Republican Bob Livingston was resigning under his own cloud of scandal, and Scalise was one of two state politicians mulling over the idea of running for the office. The other was another state rep, David Vitter, who ended up taking Livingston’s seat. Duke was also making loud noises about running for the seat, throwing the entire Louisiana Republican Party into a tizzy. In an interview with the venerable Washington news outlet Roll Call, Vitter confined himself to lambasting Duke, saying he would lose in a race against “real Republicans.” But Scalise went for the twofer, poo-pooing Duke but simultaneously reaching out to the yahoos who might have supported a Duke candidacy. He said that he and Duke agreed on many core issues, and added:
“The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”
Wow. Scalise emphasized that he and Duke agreed on just about everything that was important to voters, but geez Louise, Duke just wasn’t a candidate who could get elected. Me, I would have thought that, oh, not electing a race-baiting, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Klan-leading bigot was “the first and most important thing.” Scalise had a different view. Remember: Scalise said he and Duke shared many of the same views. The biggest difference was that in Scalise’s view, he could win an election and Duke likely could not.
On December 30, Louisiana Democrat Stephen Handwerk made it clear he didn’t believe a word of it:
“It’s disturbing to learn that Congressman Scalise has admitted that he spoke to an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a hate group and the Anti-Defamation League characterizes as anti-Semitic. It’s even more disturbing to hear that his allies are trying to sweep this incident under the rug by blaming Scalise’s staff and claiming the then-state representative didn’t know the group’s ideology. That’s ridiculous. . . If someone in Louisiana didn’t know about David Duke’s beliefs in 2002, they must have been hiding under a very large rock somewhere. . . . Which leads to some uncomfortable questions. . . . Who exactly invited Scalise in the first place? Was it David Duke? Duke addressed the group via teleconference. Wasn’t Scalise present during Duke’s remarks? And what exactly did Scalise say that so impressed the attendees that they were raving about his appearance several years later? Has he accepted any subsequent invitations from the group? Has he accepted any campaign contributions from the organization’s members? Voters deserve answers to these questions.”
It probably doesn’t help that Duke calls Scalise a “fine” man with whom he shares many values. I’m sure Duke will receive that thank-you phone call from Scalise any second now.
Either Scalise’s memory functions are so damaged that he shouldn’t do anything more involved than licking Green Stamps, or he’s lying about not knowing he was speaking to a white supremacist organization. Let’s be charitable about his mental health and assume he’s lying through his white, white teeth.
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Michael has been writing about politics, history and Web development since 2001. His first book is in development.
