After Republicans tried to push past Rep. Clay Higgins’ racist comments and send members home to campaign, the Congressional Black Caucus is not dropping the issue.
“Several members have had to increase their security,” CBC Chair Steven Horsford told NOTUS over the weekend. “Staff have had to take additional precautions in their districts and D.C. offices. There are members and staff that represent very diverse backgrounds who have to go to work every day and deal with this crap.”
Rep. Gabe Amo called the current working environment for Black lawmakers “unfortunate.”
“It’s a situation where I have to share a workplace with someone who has the audacity, the gall and racist tendencies to speak that way about anybody,” he told NOTUS. “As a son of two West African immigrants, I know that language could easily be about me.”
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And Rep. Emanuel Cleaver called the House a “very unfriendly, unhappy environment.”
“It’s sad and painful for a man to talk about people of color the way Higgins did,” he told NOTUS.
What Higgins did was baselessly claim Haitian immigrants were eating pets, calling them “wild,” “slapstick gangsters” and “thugs.”
“All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” Higgins wrote last week in a now-deleted post on X.
Speaker Mike Johnson — a fellow Louisiana Republican — claimed Higgins heard the concerns about his tweet from Black lawmakers, “prayed about it” and decided to pull down the post.
“That’s what you want a gentleman to do. I’m sure he probably regrets some language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here,” Johnson said.
The problem is, that account sharply departs from the version of events that Democrats provided to NOTUS just minutes after they tried to censure Higgins. Rep. Becca Balint told NOTUS that Higgins actually accused lawmakers of “threatening” him and that he only took down the post after Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick — the sole Haitian American in Congress — confronted him.
Horsford said on Thursday that, in his view, Higgins didn’t “show any remorse.”
“He actually told me, no, he would not,” Horsford said of his request for Higgins to remove the post.
Days later, Horsford was still stewing over Higgins’ comments. “Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick shouldn’t have to go up to a colleague and explain to him why his racist, hateful rhetoric and vitriol should be taken down,” he told NOTUS.
While Higgins did remove the post, he said last Thursday that he could put up “another controversial post tomorrow.”
“It’s not a big deal to me,” Higgins said. “It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”
When NOTUS asked Speaker Johnson’s office for comment on the concerns from Black lawmakers about Higgins’ post, a spokesperson referred NOTUS to Johnson’s remarks defending Higgins last Thursday.
As things stand, Johnson seems to have no interest in disciplining Higgins. The House Ethics Committee has a general rule that members shall “behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House,” according to its code of conduct.
But there are no guidelines on what language is appropriate. The only mention of anything pertaining to race is a rule that prohibits members from discriminating based on race, among other identity markers, when staffing their offices.
The House once had an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, but it was disbanded in March as part of a bipartisan government spending bill. Even then, its focus was on making hiring on Capitol Hill equitable, not litigating member conduct. (The Congressional Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific American Caucuses have vowed to restore the office if Democrats win back the House.)
With no clear method of recourse for Higgins’ comments, Black Democrats told NOTUS they have few avenues to address racist behavior. The mechanisms that are available — such as censuring members — are, at best, the equivalent of a press release condemning their behavior and, at worst, beneficial to the lawmaker being reprimanded.
Someone like Higgins could go on a fundraising tour claiming Democrats are trying to “cancel” him, mustering support in a district where 68% of voters went for Donald Trump in 2020.
But CBC members said a censure was an appropriate punishment — and the CBC looks poised to seek censure when the House returns in November.
“Clay Higgins should be censured. The speaker should take a stand. That’s what Jesus would do,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove told NOTUS. “It’s a start towards accountability, basic respect and decency.”
Horsford said that censuring Higgins is “a necessary action to force Speaker Johnson, Steve Scalise and every other Republican to say where they stand.”
“Do they stand for racist rhetoric by a member of Congress using official platforms or not?” he said. “And at a minimum, they should be able to stand with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and colleagues to say that one group of people, in this case Haitian immigrants, should not be pitted against another group based on made-up stories, distortions, misrepresentations and straight-up lies.”
Black lawmakers have faced a challenging year of rhetoric from some GOP colleagues.
In July, Rep. Eli Crane referred to Black Americans as “colored people.” Less than two weeks later, Rep. Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris a “DEI vice president.” And last week, Higgins made his X post.
CBC members argued the surest way to ensure that the House starts reckoning with racism in Congress was for Democrats to win back the House.
“First and foremost, the most effective way to prevent their impact on the communities that we represent is to win,” Horsford said.
“In a Republican majority of inches, it is unlikely he will be removed from his committees,” Kamlager-Dove said of Higgins. “In a Democratic majority, options are greater.”
For now, Black Democrats are just trying to keep some voter focus on Higgins’ remarks, arguing that Republicans are trying to shove the controversy into a closet and that Democrats were trying to bring some accountability to the ordeal. But that dynamic, these CBC members said, was nothing new.
As Amo put it, Black Democrats like him have stood “on the shoulders of members of the CBC and communities of color who have had to work with people with these vile thoughts.”
“We do it because we have to serve people,” Amo said. “So we endure. We’ll persist. It doesn’t make it any better, but this is an unfortunate reality of where we are today.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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