Congressman Raskin urges Democrats to avoid ‘trap,’ vote for Charlie Kirk honor

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a leading liberal voice in Congress, urged his fellow Democrats on Thursday to avoid an “obvious political trap” and vote for a Republican resolution honoring the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Kirk’s killing last week while he addressed a college audience in Utah has sparked a political furor across the U.S., with President Donald Trump and his allies vowing a crackdown on left-leaning groups that they portray as bent on undermining national unity.

There is no evidence the 22-year-old Utah man who killed Kirk with a single rifle shot had organized outside help in plotting his attack.

Raskin, a Maryland lawmaker, urged his colleagues to ignore “surplus verbiage” in the resolution and instead back it as a condemnation of violence.

“We cannot fall for that obvious political trap and should rise above it,” Raskin said. “It is essential that we come together as Americans to condemn each and every episode of political violence.”

The measure is expected to easily pass the House, where Republicans hold a 219-213 majority, on Friday.

Americans have lost their jobs and late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air over comments on Kirk that were criticized by members of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

Most of the bill praises Kirk, who energized many young voters to move into the Trump and MAGA camps over the past several years. 

Kirk rankled many on the left, accusing transgender Americans of being “mass shooters,” calling the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “a huge mistake” and asserting that prominent Black Americans such as Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not have the intelligence to achieve what they did without affirmative action.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; editing by Scott Malone and Nia Williams)