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Few members of the House Republican conference have demonstrated a knack and desire for making headlines like Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.).
And on Wednesday, she made one that her party would really prefer she hadn’t — breathing life into a decade-old controversy involving then-House GOP speaker nominee Rep. Steve Scalise (La.) and former KKK leader David Duke.
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“I personally cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone who attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” Mace said on CNN. “I would be doing an enormous disservice to the voters that I represent in South Carolina if I were to do that.”
In an instant, Mace lent legitimacy to concerns about a murky episode that has often remained on the periphery of Scalise’s attempted rise to the top. It’s something that was viewed as potentially career-imperiling when first reported in 2014, but that many other Republicans regard as overblown and which even some prominent Black Louisiana Democrats have downplayed.
By Thursday night, the opposition of Mace and other Republicans led Scalise to withdraw from the race, leaving the party to go back to Square One on picking a new speaker to replace the ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Scalise fell short for many reasons, but Mace was among the most publicly dug-in against his candidacy. And she elevated something that could have proved problematic for the party if it had moved forward with Scalise.
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Here are the basics on the situation.
In 2014 a Louisiana political blogger reported on posts from a racist online forum saying Scalise had, as a state representative in 2002, spoken to attendees of a conference of Duke’s European Unity and Rights Organization (EURO). The group included white-supremacist leaders.
Scalise soon confirmed he had spoken to “a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn,” calling it “a mistake I regret.” He cast it as an unintentional consequence of his limited staff and desire to speak to anyone who invited him as a young politician.
Soon the man who invited Scalise to speak, longtime Duke political adviser Kenny Knight, told his version of the story. He said Scalise actually spoke at a separate event of Knight’s local civic organization at the same hotel earlier the same day as the conference. While acknowledging the audience included some EURO attendees, he said Scalise was likely unaware of the conference or that he was speaking to such people.
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“He spoke early in the day to a contingent of people, prior to the conference kicking off,” Knight told Slate. “He was not there as a guest speaker at the conference.”
Precisely where the truth lies remains unclear, in large part because Scalise and the event were so low-profile at the time. Despite Slate’s report, Scalise’s office doesn’t appear to have pulled back its confirmation, and it didn’t address Knight’s account on Thursday when The Washington Post reached out. It instead pointed to those who have downplayed the controversy and vouched for Scalise’s character.
Also complicating matters is the credibility of the person who distanced Scalise from the EURO event. Knight, in addition to his long-standing ties to the prominent white supremacist, was later sentenced to five years in prison for running an opioid pill mill.
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At the very least, Scalise’s ties to Knight are problematic, given Knight’s well-known work with Duke. Knight said his political résumé was no secret.
“Now, at the time, I was a prominent person in state politics. I was on the radio, I was doing campaigns,” Knight told The Washington Post in 2014. “Steve knew who I was, but I don’t think he held it against me.”
University of Kentucky political science professor D. Stephen Voss, who worked in Louisiana as a journalist and Democratic operative in the Duke era, penned a piece this week offering a nuanced view of the episode.
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He said that the narrative about Scalise and the conference was often “broadly misleading, and insofar as it’s supposed to make Scalise sound distinct from his Republican competition [for speaker], entirely unfair”:
“Scalise accepted a shady acquaintance’s invitation to speak briefly about domestic policy before a civic association in a hotel that he should have known would host a white-supremacist conference later that day.”
Lacks zing. But it’s the story reputable news outlets have reported.
But the blogger who broke the news in 2014, Lamar White Jr., on Thursday cast doubt on the actual existence of such a civic organization.
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Part of the story here is how pervasive Duke once was in Scalise’s largely White district outside New Orleans. Scalise represents the area that in 1989 elected Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to the state legislature as a Republican. The conservative area was a base of Duke’s support in his later failed Senate and gubernatorial campaigns in the early 1990s.
The New York Times reflected in 2014 that the Scalise controversy was “a reminder of the awkward dance and hard choices that Republicans in Louisiana faced in the 1990s when Mr. Duke was one of the most charismatic politicians in the state.”
That story also surfaced a quote involving Duke that has long been used against Scalise — and one which Mace cited Wednesday. Longtime Louisiana political reporter and columnist Stephanie Grace said Scalise in their first meeting years earlier had “told me he was like David Duke without the baggage.”
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But Grace added, “I think he meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did.”
That’s something Scalise allies — and even some Louisiana Democrats — have been careful to emphasize since the story blew up.
Then-Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), a later chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, offered a key vote of support in 2014, saying, “I don’t think Steve Scalise has a racist bone in his body.”
“I am not going to let them use Steve as a scapegoat to score political points when I know him and know his family,” Richmond added.
Richmond’s successor and fellow Black Louisiana Democrat, Rep. Troy Carter (La.), echoed that sentiment Thursday.
Scalise in 1999 offered a somewhat similar comment to the one Grace recounted. While talking about a potential congressional campaign that Duke was also considering, Scalise pitched himself as more viable than Duke but with many of the same conservative policy views. Rather than focus on Duke’s racism, he cast him as a loser, first and foremost.
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“The novelty of David Duke has worn off,” Scalise told Roll Call. “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”
But by 2004, with another potential congressional campaign against Duke looming, Scalise repudiated Duke’s racist views.
“David Duke is an embarrassment to our district, and his message of hate only serves to divide us,” Scalise told New Orleans CityBusiness.
The comment came two years after the EURO conference but a decade before Scalise’s appearance would make news. It also came, notably, after Duke pleaded guilty in late 2002 to felony tax charges.
Duke didn’t run, and Scalise ultimately made way for Bobby Jindal to win the seat, with Scalise succeeding Jindal when Jindal became governor.
But 19 years after rebuking Duke, the shadow of Duke that has loomed over Louisiana politics still looms over the state’s potential first speaker of the House — with a helpful nudge from Scalise’s fellow Republican.
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