Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) should be publicly condemning Republican members who were “breaching the civility.”
Anchor Dana Bash said, “The state of your Republican Party, I want you to listen and watch this video of Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert making a racist joke about Ilhan Omar.”
During a campaign event, Boebert said, “I look to my left is there she is, Ilhan Omar. I said, well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine … I looked over, and I said, look, the jihad squad showed up today.”
Bash said, “Kevin McCarthy called Boebert and encouraged her to meet with Omar, did not publicly condemn what she said and never publicly condemned congressman Paul Gosar for tweeting an animated video of himself killing a Democratic congresswoman. Do you think McCarthy should be publicly condemning this kind of behavior?”
Hutchinson said, “I do. I think whenever, even in our own caucus, our own members, if they go the wrong direction, I mean, it has to be called out. It has to be dealt with, particularly whenever it is breaching the civility, whenever it is crossing the line in terms of violence or increasing the divide in our country.”
He added, “So one of the things that’s really important to us in the future is increasing the civil debate and civil discourse. We’ve got to look for ways that we can bring people together and not divide and certainly along racial lines. I think this last week, our justice system gave two very good verdicts that indicated that we can hold people accountable whenever they go after somebody because of their race or whenever they take the law into their own hands. Let’s look for ways to bring people together and decrease that divide.”
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