Brooks defended his comments in a phone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press and disputed the suggestion they were incendiary. He said that Democrats were the ones being incendiary, pointing to comments including an assertion by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi this year that the GOP’s failure to act on comprehensive immigration legislation had something to do with race.
“Race should not be an issue in public policy debates, we should be colorblind, we should be the melting pot,” Brooks told the AP. “But so long as the Democrats have a political campaign strategy to divide Americans based on skin pigmentation then they are the ones who are fanning the fires and doing a disservice to our country, not those who try to hold the Democrats accountable for what is a very counterproductive and sinister campaign tactic.”
To a request for comment, the spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emily Bittner, wrote in an email: “Wow. Congressman Brooks is living in his own world of paranoia, but sadly, this is precisely the kind of divisive rhetoric that has come to define House Republicans.”
