In a continuation of the historically Democratic group’s complicated history with black Republicans, members of the Congressional Black Caucus are at odds with Rep. Byron Donalds over whether they have excluded him.
Donalds, a black Florida Republican, said he was snubbed by the caucus of black lawmakers. Longtime members, including former CBC chairman G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat, deny Donalds’s membership was ever brought up in the first place.
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“We haven’t even discussed it. We haven’t been here. We’ve been out for the last three weeks. We’ve been tied up with other stuff, and I’m sure it will be discussed very soon,” Butterfield told the Washington Examiner. “I can say emphatically, his interest was not rejected … I’ve been at every meeting, and we have not discussed him, and we have taken no action.”
Donalds said he is not buying it.
“Congressman Donalds has expressed interest in joining the CBC since becoming a member of the 117th Congress and has mentioned that directly to Congresswoman Joyce Beatty and several other CBC members early on,” Donalds’s spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement to the Washington Examiner Monday night. “Our staff has also reached out on multiple occasions, and we have yet to get a response. Consideration of membership seems not to have included freshman member Congressman Donalds but juxtaposed to the six newly inducted Democrats.”
Some CBC members implied Donalds would not be welcome.
“Why does he want to be there?” Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, told the Washington Examiner. “Why? He disagrees with everything we stand for. Why does he want to be there?”
“I don’t get it,” she added. “He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like what we do. He voted to not accept the electoral votes. I don’t know why he wants to be there. It’s the wrong place.”
Buzzfeed News first reported the caucus blocked Donalds from joining, citing a source.
The CBC is nonpartisan, but its membership is overwhelmingly filled with Democratic members as only four of the 10 black Republican lawmakers since the caucus’s founding in 1971 have ever been members.
Rep. Gary Franks of Connecticut was the first black Republican to join the CBC in 1991. However, he found he was excluded from caucus strategy meetings and often missed meetings on his own.
Frustrated by his treatment, he threatened to leave the CBC. After Franks’s departure, no GOP lawmaker joined the caucus for 14 years until Rep. Allen West of Florida came to Capitol Hill in 2011.
West’s tenure in the CBC, however, was short and stormy. In 2013, following West’s reelection defeat, the caucus reverted to all Democrats.
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“The Congressional Black Caucus has been around for 50 years, and it’s kind of loosely knit, but one common thread that I think goes through every member is we have to share the same values,” Butterfield said. “And if we sense that a member does not share our values, then there’s pause for some concern.”
