When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., lost his seat in the Republican primary last summer, Rep. Peter Roskam, R- Ill., was next in line to move into the House leadership, joining House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.
The Southern majority among the House Republican rank and file objected to the lack of representation by the Old Confederate states in the leadership and fielded an ultraconservative Louisiana physician, Rep. Steve Scalise, to run against Roskam for the Majority Whip position. When the caucus voted last June, Scalise won the number-three leadership position with 117 out of 233 votes.
Now, just six months later, Scalise — who headed the Republican Study Group, the most extreme right-wing faction in the House — is at the center of a raging controversy because records show that he addressed the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) conference, a white-supremacy conclave, when he was a state representative in 2002. EURO was then the latest iteration of a series of whites’ rights groups founded by former KKK grand wizard — and former Louisiana state representative — David Duke.
Scalise claims he does not recall speaking to the conclave. He had a very small staff then, he says, besides which he says he “detest[s] any kind of hate group” (any kind except for anti-gay hate groups like the Family Research Council, of course).
Scalise also claimed not to know that that EURO was a Neo-Confederate group because Google did not exist at the time. “I was without the advantages of a tool like Google,” Scalise told a reporter on Monday. “It’s nice to have those. Those tools weren’t available back then.”
Maybe Google hadn’t reached Louisiana Intertubes in 2002, but it was launched in 1998.
By contrast, when reached for comment, Duke offered a hearty endorsement of Scalise, calling the Republican majority whip “a fine family man and a good person.”
Did you see that he said it was just like talking to the League or Women Voters???
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/29/politics/steve-scalise-white-supremacist-group-speech/index.html?hpt=hp_t4
“Scalise also equated his appearance before the white supremacist forum with one before the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group known for helping to register new voters. ‘I spoke to the League of Women Voters, a pretty liberal group. … I still went and spoke to them. I spoke to any group that called, and there were a lot of groups calling,’ he said.”
Only someone who sees nothing wrong with addressing white supremacists would call the LWV “pretty liberal.”