On the afternoon of January 17, 2019, the U.S. House was in chaos. The government had been shut down for almost four weeks. Republicans were shouting across the aisle about a procedural fight over a bill to reopen it. And standing in the well of the House, waiting to speak, was Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California — a Democrat, and a descendant of Mexican immigrants.

Into that noise, a voice yelled: "Go back to Puerto Rico!"

The chamber erupted. It was Jason Smith, the Republican congressman from Missouri's 8th District.

Here is the part that should stay with you. Cárdenas turned around and asked, right there, who had said it.

"I responded by asking who said it and there was about 50 mostly male Republicans staring at me, and no one would admit that they said it. I asked several times but no one owned up to the fact that they said it," Cárdenas told The Hill.

Smith was standing in that room. He said nothing. It was only later — after the cameras had caught it, after reporters started asking — that his office confirmed he was the one.

The excuse

Smith's explanation was that he wasn't talking about Cárdenas at all. He was talking about a trip.

"Was speaking to all the Democrats who were down vacationing in Puerto Rico last weekend during the shutdown, not any individual member," Smith told The Hill.

His office said the same thing to Roll Call: the comment "was directed at all the Democrats who were vacationing down in Puerto Rico last weekend during the government shutdown, not towards any individual member."

Cárdenas ran that trip. He chairs Bold PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and he had led a delegation of 36 members to the island. They met with Puerto Rican officials, with business and labor representatives, and with the island's Fiscal Control Board.

So out of the entire Democratic caucus, Smith aimed "go back to Puerto Rico" at the exact moment the Latino member who organized the Puerto Rico trip was standing at the podium. Cárdenas didn't buy the timing either:

"It just so happens I was in the well on the floor of the people's House when he screamed that out very loud."

And on the explanation arriving hours later:

"I would have preferred that Jason Smith would have owned up to it at the moment so I could have asked him what he meant and he could have clarified to a fellow member. Instead it sounds like after having time to think about it he's come up with this explanation."

Smith eventually called Cárdenas and apologized. Cárdenas accepted — Smith "took responsibility for the comment and sincerely apologized. I accepted his apology," he said. He chose not to push it further.

That's more than most people in this business ever do. It still doesn't explain the rest of it.

The shutdown he wouldn't end

Smith's whole defense rests on outrage that Democrats went to Puerto Rico "during the shutdown." So look at what Smith himself did about that shutdown.

It was a real emergency. The partial shutdown ran five weeks, from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019. The Congressional Budget Office later found it delayed roughly $18 billion in federal spending and permanently wiped about $3 billion off the U.S. economy — money that never came back. Federal workers went without pay. CBO noted that some private businesses that lost income "will never recoup" it.

Here is Smith's record on ending it:

• January 16, 2019 — the day before the outburst — the House passed H.R. 268, a disaster relief package that also included funding to reopen the closed agencies. Smith voted no. It passed 237–187 anyway.
• January 17, 2019 — the same day he shouted at Cárdenas — Smith voted no on taking up the continuing resolution to reopen the government through February 28. That was the very bill the floor fight was about.
• January 23, 2019 — when that resolution finally came up for passage, Smith voted no again. It passed 229–184.

Three chances to end the shutdown he was so furious about. Three no votes.

And there's one more wrinkle. That January 16 bill Smith voted against? According to the Congressional Research Service, it carried $14.19 billion in disaster relief — including more than $600 million in emergency food aid for Puerto Rico, still recovering from Maria.

So on Wednesday he voted against sending food money to Puerto Rico. On Thursday he told a colleague to go back there.

Puerto Ricans are Americans

This is the part that makes "go back to Puerto Rico" work as an insult in the first place — and the part Smith's explanation quietly depends on.

Puerto Rico is not another country. It's a U.S. territory. The people who live there are U.S. citizens, born citizens, the same as anybody in Missouri's 8th District. "Go back to Puerto Rico" only stings if you're treating an American place as a foreign one, and an American colleague as someone who doesn't belong here.

Cárdenas, a Californian and a descendant of Mexican immigrants, said exactly that:

"When people blurt things out like that, it certainly sounds like the old saying, 'go back to where you came from.'"

"Since I was a little boy I've heard that blurted at me many times, but it's sad that anything even remotely close to that would be said to me on the floor of the House."

"But they were children. To hear an adult member of Congress scream that out is very disturbing and disappointing. We have a long way to go in this country when it comes to people seeing others as equals."

That instinct — treating Puerto Rico as somewhere Americans get sent back to — didn't stop with Smith. Seven years later, Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news to announce Congress was investigating a Super Bowl halftime show by a Puerto Rican performer, and admitted in the same breath that he doesn't speak Spanish. Tennessee's Andy Ogles said the same show was "conclusive proof that Puerto Rico should never be a state." And in Ohio, Michael Rulli went on Fox News to cheer the mass deportation of his own state's Haitians — "let's get 'em all out of here."

The vote that tells you whether he meant it

Six months after Smith apologized, the House got a chance to say, on the record, that "go back" is not something a leader says about Americans.

On July 16, 2019, the House voted on H. Res. 489, which condemned President Trump's racist comments — specifically for saying "that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should 'go back' to other countries," for calling immigrants and asylum seekers "invaders," and for saying members of Congress who are immigrants "do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America."

That is, almost word for word, the thing Smith had apologized for shouting.

The resolution passed 240–187. Four Republicans voted yes. Jason Smith was not one of them. He voted no.

An apology is a private phone call. A vote is a public record. When Smith had to choose between the two, he chose the record.

Why this still matters in Missouri's 8th

Smith is not a backbencher anymore. He now chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful tax panel in Congress, where he writes the nation's tax law — including a provision he buried on page 1,081 of Trump's budget bill that would double the prison sentence for leaking a billionaire's tax return.

The man holding that gavel is the same man who screamed an insult across the House floor, wouldn't admit it in a room of 50 colleagues, blamed a delegation trip, voted three times against ending the shutdown he was using as the excuse, and then voted against putting the House on record that Americans shouldn't be told to go back anywhere.

He apologized to Tony Cárdenas. He never had to answer to us.

We deserve better.

Source

House floor erupts after GOP lawmaker shouts 'Go back to Puerto Rico' — Roll Call, January 17, 2019. Photo: Jason Smith, 2024 official portrait (Wikimedia Commons).