CNN anchor John King invoked the horrifying incident with Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin on Thursday to criticize House Republicans.
After nearly one dozen ballots, House Republicans have failed to elect a new House speaker. A faction of 20 Republican lawmakers have been blocking Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid over concerns that his leadership will continue to empower the political status quo.
What did King say?
Discussing the chaos in the House, King asserted that Republicans do not care about respecting government institutions, apathy that he claimed is demonstrated by the chaos.
“Whoever wins the speakership, will that person be speaker for a week? A month? By August when you have to do the debt ceiling, and that means you have to be responsible … respecting the system, the organizations, the government?” King began. “They don’t care. They don’t care.”
Because House Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House, King said each member must accept “responsibility as a member of the team.”
“Imagine if a baseball team goes on the field and after two pitches, the right fielder decides I want to pitch. It can’t work that way. Someone has to be in charge,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you always agree with your boss, you don’t always agree with your manager. You don’t always agree with your coach.”
That’s when he invoked the scary incident with Hamlin.
“Imagine those two doctors we just listened to who treated, and all the people in the field who cared for that Buffalo Bills player: if somebody said ‘no’ or ‘no, I want to do the other job’— it doesn’t work that way,” King said.
“When you’re on a team you have to yes. Yes, you go to the boss’s office and you say, ‘I want this, I want this, I want this.’ But eventually somebody has to make a decision,” he continued. “And you have to accept the responsibility of the government.”
King added, “They don’t want that responsibility. They don’t care about that responsibility. They don’t respect that responsibility.”
To round off his rant, King gloated that Republicans underwhelmed in the 2022 midterm elections because “the American people said we don’t want crazy,” yet Republicans won control of the House, which has, in his estimation, resulted in “crazy.”