Republican Rep. Rodney Davis has a novel explanation for why there aren’t more Republican women in Congress: It’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Mark Maxwell of TV station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois, reported this gem.
“There are too few members of our Republican conference that are women or African-American or are a minority,” Davis told a group of women on Monday. (He’s not wrong there.)
”I get asked a lot, ‘what do you think as a Republican with the fact that you have many fewer women in your conference today than you ever have?’” he continued. “I like to remind people that it is Nancy Pelosi who in many cases spent millions of dollars to elect a male Democrat over a female [Republican] in swing districts.”
Um. Davis’ “many cases” boils down to two cases, which if won by Republican women would have brought the total number of Republican women in the House to a whopping 15, which is substantially fewer than the number of Democratic women elected for the first time in 2018, many of them in swing districts previously represented by Republican men.
So aside from having a truly special thing to blame Pelosi for—beating Republicans? seriously?—Davis is basically arguing that Pelosi should have been willing to have fewer overall women in the House in order to have a couple more of them be Republicans. This is a special kind of inane.
EMILY’S List responded in a statement: “To be clear: Of the 40 seats Republicans lost in 2018, 19 Republican men were replaced by EMILY’s List-endorsed Democratic women. We look forward to Congressman Davis joining them.”
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