Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) defended her vote against a resolution to honor the life and legacy of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and lamented that more Democrats did not join the 58 “no” votes in the House.
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In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Crockett said it “honestly hurts my heart” that all but two members who opposed the resolution, according to her own count, were people of color.
“For the most part, the only people that voted no were people of color because the rhetoric that Charlie Kirk continuously put out there was rhetoric that specifically targeted people of color,” Crockett said in the Sunday interview.
“It is unfortunate that more of my colleagues, even on my side of the aisle, could not see the amount of harm that this man was attempting to inflict upon our communities,” she added.
Crockett also noted that Kirk, the conservative activist who died after being shot at an open-air event on Sept. 10, invoked Crockett’s name directly on a podcast released about a month before his assassination.
“I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but he got out there and he was talking negatively about me directly,” Crockett said. “So if there was any way that I was going to honor somebody who decided that they were just going to negatively talk about me and proclaim that I was somehow involved in a ‘great white replacement,’ yeah, I’m not honoring that kind of stuff.”
She added: “Especially as a civil rights attorney, and understanding how I got to Congress, knowing that there were people that died, people that were willing to die, that worked to make sure that voices like mine could exist in this place.”
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Crockett made clear, however, that while she did not want to celebrate Kirk’s politics, she in no way condoned what happened to him.
“Whether it’s heated or not, the fact is, Charlie Kirk should still be here,” Crockett said. “It should not have been that there was political violence that resulted because of the words that were coming out of his mouth.”
Crockett noted that many of her conservative political opponents “get very upset when I talk about white supremacy,” adding, “But that doesn’t mean that somebody should then try to find a bullet or try to find a knife and harm me.”
“Not in America. That’s not who we are supposed to be.”
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