Pelosi Runs Afoul of House Rules in Calling Trump Tweets Racist

(Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suffered an embarrassing setback Tuesday after Republicans called her out for violating the chamber’s rules by saying President Donald Trump’s comments about four freshman House members were racist.

”These comments from the White House are disgraceful and disgusting and those comments are racist,” Pelosi had said on the House floor during debate on a proposed resolution condemning the president’s remarks as racist.

The Democratic-controlled House then voted 232-190 against striking her remarks from the record. The vote was strictly along party lines, with former Republican Justin Amash of Michigan, now an independent, voting with the Democrats.

Read more: House Nears Contentious Vote to Condemn ‘Racist’ Trump Tweets

House rules prohibit calling the president a racist or saying his statements were racist. After an objection by Republican Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat who was presiding over the House, said her remarks were not in order.

“I stand by my statement,” Pelosi told reporters as she returned to the House chamber during the vote, adding that she is “proud” of the attention being brought to the matter.

“What the president said was completely inappropriate against our colleagues, but not just against them but against so many people in our country when he said to them go back where they came from,” Pelosi said.

The floor dispute is part of the controversy following the president’s tweets on Sunday that the four lawmakers, all of whom are women of color, should “go back” to the countries they “originally came from,” instead of telling Americans “how our government is to be run.”

--With assistance from Laura Litvan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Anna Edgerton

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