Players on both Congressional baseball teams will be wearing gold caps Thursday night to honor Rep. Steve Scalise thanks to Louisiana State University, which overnighted about 70 hats and two dozen T-shirts to Washington.
“We are grateful to Congress for thinking of Rep. Steve Scalise during this difficult time and recognizing him by wearing LSU gear in support of his recovery,” LSU President F. King Alexander said in a statement posted to the university’s website. “Rep. Scalise is a proud LSU alumnus and great supporter of the university, and we are proud to help out even in this small way.”
Scalise graduated from LSU in 1989, where he studied political science and computer programming and was twice elected speaker of the Student Government Association. The congressman then served in Louisiana’s state legislature for 12 years before joining Congress.
Interns were seen handing out the baseball caps Thursday morning.
LSU also tweeted an image of the hats arriving, with the hashtag #AllforScalise.
The LSU gear arrived in the nick of time. While the original plan to honor Scalise, organized by the office of Kansas Rep. Roger Marshall, included purchasing LSU t-shirts for members of the congressional baseball teams to wear at the game, the order did not ship in time, according to a tweet from Marshall’s press secretary Eric Pahls. But Pahls later added that “we might end up with some shirts after all.”
Scalise has played in several congressional baseball games, including last year’s 8-7 Republican victory. He proudly sports an LSU jersey each time.
But Scalise won’t be the only victim of Wednesday’s shooting honored at National Park Thursday night. Michigan Rep. Fred Upton tweeted Thursday that friends of the wounded lobbyist Matt Mika will be giving out small white ribbons in support of Mika and all those affected by the attack.
The annual fundraiser had raised over $1 million for charity and sold more than 20,000 tickets as of Thursday afternoon, according to the Congressional Sports for Charity website.