I think it's a fair question. After all, we can argue about whether he knew he was at a David Duke meeting in 2002 but there are some other things he's done that there is no question of. We know he called himself 'David Duke without the baggage' and that he voted against MLK day twice.
As the Daily Beast notes, apparently today's GOP from Boehner on down is still cool with this.
"The refusal of any major Republican to call for Steve Scalise’s resignation is both completely deplorable and totally unsurprising."
"What Steve Scalise did in appearing before David Duke’s group—andd in twice voting against a Martin Luther King holiday, and in reportedly referring to himself in a chat with a journalist as “David Duke without the baggage”—tells us a lot about Steve Scalise. But what the Republican Party is now doing—or not doing—with regard to Scalise tells us a lot about the Republican Party, and that’s a little more important."
As the Daily Beast notes, apparently today's GOP from Boehner on down is still cool with this.
"The refusal of any major Republican to call for Steve Scalise’s resignation is both completely deplorable and totally unsurprising."
"What Steve Scalise did in appearing before David Duke’s group—andd in twice voting against a Martin Luther King holiday, and in reportedly referring to himself in a chat with a journalist as “David Duke without the baggage”—tells us a lot about Steve Scalise. But what the Republican Party is now doing—or not doing—with regard to Scalise tells us a lot about the Republican Party, and that’s a little more important."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/07/today-s-gop-still-cool-with-racist-pandering.html
Michael Tomasky is dead right here and that's why I for one think it's a nice gift to the Democrats for Boehner to defend him like this. It's like the White House says: if that's how the GOP wants to represent itself, more power to it. It makes it pretty easy to know who the GOP really is regardless of the rhetoric. Tomasky does point out that the GOP constituents don't have a problem with it.
"So the fact that Scalise still has his leadership gig tells us that the key stakeholders and constituencies within the GOP aren’t particularly bothered by the fact that he spoke to white supremacists and indeed might be one himself. They’re certainly embarrassed, I should think. Surely they see the problem here. But they see it as a public-relations problem, a matter to be damage-controlled, which is quite different from seeing it as being plainly and substantively wrong."
It's worse than that: this is actually a sop to the Tea Party from Boehner. Certainly, Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, see the problem with it but they think they need this to please the TP.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/01/boehners-new-larger-majority-and.html
Again, if you're a Democrat, yes they should drop Scalise but as long as they don't it's a very effective weapon. One just has to point to Scalise to make the point that the GOP, rhetoric aside, remains the party of the Southern Strategy.
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