Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa drew allegations of McCarthyism when he objected Tuesday to the naming of a post office in Berkeley, Calif., for a 94-year-old former city councilwoman.<\/p>\n
King contended the councilwoman, Maudelle Shirek, represented a departure from “American values”; he later said she had communist ties. The House, in a rare step, defeated the designation on a 215-190 vote.<\/p>\n
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who considers Shirek a mentor, said King’s actions were “just shameful.” Lee said King’s “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover than today’s House of Representatives.”<\/p>\n
King defended Joe McCarthy, the late U.S. senator from Wisconsin who in the 1950s gained fame through pursuing allegations of communism and whose name is often used in a derogatory way to signal stifling of dissent.<\/p>\n
“If she studied her history, she’d recognize Joe McCarthy was a great American hero,” King said of Lee, in an interview.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s almost comical. We’ve reached a point with the Republican congressional caucus in which a Dem will accuse a GOP lawmaker of McCarthyism and he or she will consider it a compliment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dedicating the names of post offices and courthouses are among the more mundane tasks Congress takes on regularly. It gives lawmakers a chance to score a few points with the folks back home and it never, ever, sparks a contentious political fight. Well, not usually. Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa drew allegations of McCarthyism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}