Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia responded to a Senate GOP colleague’s vote against moving forward on several Republican health care bills by saying, “somebody needs to go over there to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass.”
Responding to a question about Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s “no” vote from MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Wednesday, he used the expression, which has Southern roots and loosely means to beat someone up in retribution.
Early Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump called out Sen. Lisa Murkowski for her vote against the GOP’s effort to repeal Obamacare. He tweeted, “Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!”
Carter went on to defend the President’s public criticism of a fellow Republican, saying the tweet is “perfectly fair.”
Mary Carpenter, a spokesperson for Carter, said that his “comment was in no way directed towards Senator Murkowski specifically.” She added: “This is a Southern phrase used frequently throughout Rep. Carter’s lifetime which simply means, ‘get your act together.'”
Carter questioned how his colleagues in the Senate can “say, ‘I voted for this last year but I am not going to vote for it this year.'” He added that the Republican defections on Obamacare repeal are “extremely frustrating for those of us who have put so much into this effort.”
On Monday, one of Carter’s colleagues, Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas, said in an interview that he might ask GOP holdouts on the party’s health care push to step outside — if they were men from his home state.
Farenthold told Bob Jones on “Keys 1440 AM” that if the holdouts were “a guy from South Texas, I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style.” He appeared to be referencing the duel in 1804 in which Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton.
Farenthold apologized on Monday night, calling the comment “tongue-in-cheek.”