House Majority Whip Steve Scalise
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and his allies have been putting out a barrage of explanations for why his 2002 speech to a white supremacist group doesn't mean he should be seen as a politician who would willingly court a white supremacist group. The media being what it is, some of these excuses are being taken a lot
more seriously than they deserve, as Lamar White Jr., the blogger who broke the story to begin with, explains.
First and foremost is Scalise's own explanation that he didn't know who he was speaking to because he was speaking to soooo many groups as part of a campaign against a tax plan that he just couldn't keep track of them all. Problem being, not only do such sketchy reports of what Scalise said to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) suggest that he wasn't speaking about that tax plan, but the timing really, really doesn't work out:
In mid-May of 2002, virtually no one in the state of Louisiana was publicly campaigning against two pre-filed bills that hadn’t even been heard in committee. No one was on a tour. No one was issuing statements to the media about it. Even after it passed the House 70-13 on June 3, state Senate president John Hainkel, a Republican from New Orleans, told the Advocate (now behind a paywall), “It ain’t going nowhere and everybody knows that. They were just playing games, sending it over here. If I was a betting man, I wouldn’t put any money on that going anywhere.” In order to go to the voters, it’d need a two-thirds majority; no one thought that was possible. Its failure had been considered a foregone conclusion. Miraculously, however, it somehow passed the Senate 29-10. And when it won the approval of Louisiana voters in November, Gov. Mike Foster, a Republican, called it “the upset of the century.”
Why does any of this matter?
Because for the last several days, national news publications, including the New York Times, have repeated Rep. Scalise’s claim that his appearance at the EURO conference was an oversight caused by his participation in a much larger campaign, a campaign that involved more than 100 other events and appearances. There’s no question he eventually did embark on a tour against the Nov. 5 ballot initiative, but there is also no question in my mind that he did not speak to that particular conference of white nationalists about a tax plan.
Additionally, Scalise has claimed that, since he was in the midst of this frantic campaign, he was too understaffed to vet every group he spoke to, especially since "I was without the advantages of a tool like Google. It’s nice to have those. Those tools weren’t available back then." Except that in addition to not having been in the middle of a big campaign against a tax plan he doesn't seem to have spoken about to EURO, Google existed in 2002 and had for a few years. And if ever you were going to take a couple minutes to find out a little more about an organization you were about to speak to, wouldn't the name "European-American Unity and Rights Organization" tip you off that maybe some due diligence was in order?
It simply defies belief that Scalise didn't know what he was doing when he spoke to a white supremacist group with a white supremacist name at an event that had already caused public controversy and that had been organized by a known David Duke associate. That kind of incompetence is just not consistent with the kind of political savvy it takes to rise as swiftly in congressional leadership as Scalise has done. No, he knew. Dog-whistling to white supremacists was a political calculation on his part, a way to help build his base for the congressional run he was already plotting. The bottom line remains this: If Steve Scalise isn't personally a white supremacist—and I have no way to know if he is or isn't—he's certainly willing to court their votes.