Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., told Newsmax on Friday that while he voted in favor of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, he "didn’t feel good about" it because of how Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., handled the vote.
"The speaker gave us assurances about an hour before the vote [that] we were going to pull it and fix it, and then he didn't do it," Good said during an appearance on "Wake Up America."
"And he put us in that position of, Do we stand with our friends and neighbors across the country, who are suffering like we've not seen, with these violent antisemitic expressions across our country? It was a terrible bill.
"It was a vote that was terrible on each side. Many of my colleagues voted against it. I ended up voting for it. Didn't feel good about it, quite frankly, because of the circumstances."
The House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act on Wednesday in a 320-91 vote. The bill, HR 6090, would require the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of antisemitism when determining whether Jews had been discriminated against under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Critics cited concerns about free speech protections being eroded by the legislation.
Responding to host Rob Finnerty's question about whether the bill criminalizes disparaging Jews in Israel in America, Good said, "It's a very dangerous road it has went down and you're exactly right to express your concerns."
"We fought about what to do if it came to the floor," he said of the bill. "We fought trying to keep it from going to the floor so that it would be corrected to address … support for our Jewish friends and neighbors and against the antisemitism, but not in a way that makes it dangerous from a First Amendment standpoint. So, again, I can't defend it."
Calling the vote on the bill the "latest failure from Speaker Johnson," Good said the Antisemitism Awareness Act "should have never been brought to the floor."
"We begged the speaker to pull the bill and to fix it and bring it back next week with corrected language that would address the concerns that many of us had on the First Amendment and the examples that were given," he said.
"The speaker literally said to me: 'If we pull the bill now, there'll be an international incident because we pulled the bill.’ He told me that on the House floor as I was, frankly, yelling at him on the House floor, that he brought this bill forward for a vote. It shouldn't have happened."
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Nicole Wells ✉
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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