Earlier this year, Iowa Congressman Steve King’s long history of racist remarks appeared to finally catch up with him. Colleagues who had turned a blind eye for years to his coded paeans to European culture and dark warnings about immigrant hordes replacing Western values finally had enough when King seemingly defended the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” in an interview with The New York Times. King was formally condemned by the House, stripped of his plum committee assignments, and relegated to the “pariah caucus” alongside fellow ne’er-do-wells Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter.

Now, however, King wants back in the action. In order to save face—and, perhaps, to stave off a primary challenger in 2020—King is doing everything in his power not to be a lame duck. As part of his promise to hold one town hall in every county in his district for the next year, King stopped by Rock Rapids on Monday, where he shook hands, pledged to support Donald Trump’s border-wall emergency declaration, and, according to the Sioux City Journal, called on God’s help to lift him out of the doghouse:

In front of another friendly audience Monday, U.S. Rep. Steve King urged his supporters to pray for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to restore King’s committee assignments, saying the California Republican needs to “separate his ego from this issue and look at it objectively.”

Of course, prayers alone won’t cut it. “Kevin McCarthy has been getting a lot of phone calls, and the more phone calls he gets and the more persistent that it is, the more he is gonna realize that it was a bad decision he made, based upon one comment misquoted in The New York Times, reported as fact,” he told the crowd, urging a “critical mass” of Republican House caucus members to increase pressure—both metaphysical and otherwise—to get him back on his committees.

Prior to being rebuked by the House, King sat on the powerful Judiciary and Agricultural Committees, where he was known as a harsh inquisitor into all things Hillary Clinton, if not a particularly active lawmaker. (As the Des Moines Register noted, King only passed one piece of legislation as primary sponsor during his 16 years in Congress.) Now, without more meaningful work to occupy his mind, King has more time than ever to fixate on those who have wronged him. “The language police are out there day after day after day after day . . . They are searching the Internet for something to be offended by,” he told the crowd in Rock Rapids, who later praised him for protecting their values. “You are carried in prayer, and we cover our president in prayer,” said one constituent in response.

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