Violence must be called out when it "happens on both sides," because it is wrong when anyone resorts to such acts to resolve issues, Rep. Steve Scalise said Thursday.
"Last week, what happened was an insurrection," the Louisiana Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "If you are going over police officers and crawling through windows, you are not a guest in a building anymore. You have literally violated the law."
But Scalise said that he made a point in his comments during Wednesday's debate on impeaching President Donald Trump that some of the Democrats who are calling out the attack on the Capitol not only didn't call out the violence during the racial equality protests last summer, but some lawmakers were "fanning the flames."
"You can't have it both ways," said Scalise. "You have got to be consistent when calling out violence. None of us should support that."
Meanwhile, only impeachment, and not a potential censure came before Congress on Wednesday, and Scalise said he thinks there should have been more of an investigation before the single article of impeachment was filed.
"One of the things we also called for and we actually pushed a vote on this yesterday was to get an actual commission to look into what happened, at every angle," said Scalise. "They literally did an impeachment without even a hearing in committee. That's never happened in the history of our country."
The Senate won't be taking up the impeachment until either Jan. 19 or 20 at the earliest, he added, so there was time to have hearings, but "they didn't want that. They just want to keep ratcheting up the rhetoric."
But, he added, the rhetoric must be "turned down" nationwide, as "people are very much on edge."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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