Steve Scalise Racist Controversy Louisiana

"David Duke Without the Baggage": The Line Steve Scalise Has Never Been Able to Explain Away

Scalise spoke to a hate group founded by a former Klan grand wizard, told a reporter he was Duke without the baggage, and voted twice against a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday. Now he's the House GOP's elder statesman and a contender for Speaker.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

In July 2026, The Hill described Steve Scalise as having reached "his peak elder statesman era" — the House Majority Leader who provides "institutional memory" for the Republican conference, and who is talked about as the next Speaker of the House.

Before he gets there, Louisiana and the country should sit with a sentence he said out loud, to a reporter, about twenty years before that.

"David Duke without the baggage"

Stephanie Grace was a new reporter covering Jefferson Parish when she first met Scalise, then a young state legislator. Here is how she opened her column in The Advocate on December 31, 2014:

"This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage."

Grace spelled out what the word "baggage" was doing in that sentence:

"The 'baggage,' of course, was Duke's past, his racist and anti-Semitic views and his former role as a KKK grand wizard."

David Duke is not an obscure figure in Louisiana. He is a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who won more than 600,000 votes running for U.S. Senate in 1990 and for governor in 1991.

Scalise's pitch, as the reporter who heard it understood it, was that he could carry Duke's politics into respectable rooms.

The speech to Duke's group

In December 2014, a Louisiana blogger named Lamar White Jr. found an account, on a white supremacist forum, of Scalise speaking in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization — EURO, a hate group founded by Duke.

Scalise's story moved. As CNN laid out the sequence: his aides first called it "probable," then "likely." Then he said he didn't specifically remember it, and that in 2002 he "went and spoke to any group that called" while campaigning against a state tax plan. Then came the statement:

"One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret."

The Southern Poverty Law Center went through the excuses one at a time in its 2015 report, and found that they did not hold together:

The "I didn't know who they were" defense. Scalise "was a state representative in his 20s when Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990 and governor in 1991," and Duke's organizations "received enormous amounts of publicity between 1989 and the 2002 meeting." SPLC's conclusion: "Scalise's claim of ignorance was almost impossible to believe."
The "he was really at a neighborhood meeting" defense. A longtime Duke aide, Kenny Knight, first told The Washington Post that Scalise attended the EURO meeting and was the first to speak — then told the Times-Picayune that Scalise had actually been at a neighborhood association meeting in the same hotel room a few hours earlier. SPLC checked: "There is no record at all of the association cited by Knight."
The "I was fighting a tax plan" defense. The tax plan Scalise named "had not even been heard in a legislative committee yet," and the campaign against it "only began months after the EURO meeting."

The votes underneath the speech

A single appearance can be a mistake. A voting record is a pattern. From the same SPLC report:

In 1999 and again in 2004, Scalise was among "lonely groups of three and six Louisiana legislators, respectively, who voted against a state Martin Luther King Jr. holiday."
In 1996, he "was one of two legislative committee members who tried to kill a resolution apologizing for slavery."

And in 1999, Roll Call reported that Scalise "said he embraces many of the same 'conservative' views as Duke, but is more viable."

That's the same idea as the "baggage" line, said to a second outlet, years apart. It is the argument that the only real problem with David Duke was that David Duke couldn't win.

Scalise made that argument explicitly. Asked by Roll Call in 1999 why Duke wouldn't be a good congressional candidate, here is what he said was "the first and most important thing":

"The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can't get elected, and that's the first and most important thing."

Not the Klan. Not the anti-Semitism. Electability.

Then he put out a statement about Dr. King

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2015 — weeks after all of this became national news — Scalise issued a statement praising King. The Advocate ran it next to the fact that he had twice voted against recognizing King's birthday in his own state:

"Dr. King challenged our country to fulfill the promises of liberty, equality, and justice prescribed in the founding of our great nation."

He was one of three votes against the holiday in 1999. He was one of six in 2004. Then he wrote that.

Why we're bringing it up in 2026

Because he kept the job, and then he got bigger ones.

SPLC wrote in 2015 that if Scalise "were linked to any other racist groups or events," his career "would be gone with the wind." He wasn't, and it wasn't. He stayed Majority Whip. He became Majority Leader — the man who decides which bills reach the House floor. He is now, by The Hill's account, the institutional memory of the House Republican conference and a leading candidate to be Speaker.

Nobody in Republican leadership has ever required him to answer the actual question, which is not "did you know who EURO was." It's the one Stephanie Grace wrote down: what did he mean when he told a reporter he was David Duke without the baggage, and does he still think the problem with Duke was the packaging?

He has never said. He has never been asked to.

This is a party that has gotten very comfortable with this — a congressman whose son-in-law posts Nazi propaganda, another who spoke at a white nationalist conference two years running, another who wore blackface and then went on TV to argue it wasn't "truly" blackface. Scalise is the one who got promoted to the top of it.

We deserve better.