Scalise Almost 4 Years After Shooting: ‘I Just Started to Pray’; God ‘Truly Performed Miracles’

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) said God performed miracles on June 14, 2017, reflecting on the shooting of Republican congressmen at a congressional baseball practice game in which he was shot.

“I just started to pray,” said Scalise on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. “I’ve got a strong faith, and I just said, ‘You know, what? I’m just going to have a conversation with God, and put it in his hands,’ and once I did it, it’s amazing how calm everything got, because I truly just didn’t want to go that day.”

Scalise continued, “First thing that came into my mind — I’ve got a beautiful young daughter, and I said, ‘God, don’t let Madison have to walk down the aisle alone.’ I just had that image of not being able to walk my daughter down the aisle when, one day when, she’s in it. Those, those were the things that were going through my head.”

LISTEN:

He added, “I was hearing everything, but it just [was] kind of like I went to another place. [There was] nothing else I could do, so I just turned it over to God, and boy, he performed miracles — truly performed miracles that day.”

Scalise remarked, “There was a moment, finally, when I was put on the helicopter, and it seemed like it was hours — it was probably maybe a total of of 30, 40 minutes from when the shooting started to when I got put on a helicopter to be taken to the hospital — but I could definitely feel myself starting to fade.”

Scalise’s blood pressure had become critical due to blood loss.

“By the time I got to the hospital a few minutes later, they said I had a zero blood pressure, which [was] another miracle,” Scalise shared. “Very few people make it through that, but they were able to kind of hold me together. I did feel my body kind of start to shut down, and I just said, ‘Just take me somewhere. I don’t want to die on this ball field.’”

He went on, “Fortunately, they were able to get me to the hospital in minutes and into the emergency room, and the surgeons performed more miracles. … I was in a coma for about three days, but once I came out, they really walked me through all the things that happened. I had nine different surgeries. Lucky to be alive. God performs miracles.”

Adrenaline after being shot mitigated the pain of his injury at the time, Scalise stated. “I surely felt that pain later when I came out of the coma and [was] coming out of all these major surgeries, but I didn’t feel that same pain on the ball field. Your body just kind of diverts your attention away so that you can focus on staying alive.”

Marlow observed how Democrats and the broader left regularly frame the right as the primary political source of domestic terrorism.

“The rhetoric over the last few years since [the shooting] is that it’s actually right wingers who are the biggest domestic terror threat [and that] the biggest threat in terms of physical safety in the country is right-wing radicals,” he said. “I’m not saying that that there isn’t any of that — but it just seems like from your vantage point, you literally were on the brink of death because of a militant left-wing assassin.”

Scalise replied, “When you’re conservative, you know there’s a double standard, and it’s not right that there is. It’s just unfortunate. I always say there’s no place for violence, no matter where it comes from. Clearly there is a lot of well-documented violence that comes from the left. I just speak out against it wherever I see it, and I remind people that America is built on this foundation that you can disagree with each other.”

He concluded, “Despite what Prince Harry says, we’ve got a great First Amendment in the United States of America, because it allows us the ability to question government, to question leaders, to question each other, but it doesn’t allow you to resort to violence to resolve those disputes, and that’s where clearly some people have a disconnect. The media ought to be standing up against [political violence] on both sides.”