House Republicans are balking against continued masking rules, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele said they could end the mandate by getting vaccinated or proving that they already had.
Democratic lawmakers voted 218-210 to keep masking in place, saying they were tired of wearing face coverings, too, but expressing concern that their GOP colleagues might still be able to spread the virus.
"You know a lot of these people are being hypocrites," the "Morning Joe" host said. "You know that a lot of these people have secretly gotten vaccines and they're posing publicly to their anti-vax crowd, to the Qanon crowd, and claiming that they didn't, and so, of course, it's not only impacting people as they go on the House floor to deliberate, but impacting their staff members, as well. it's impacting the people they come in contact with all the time. Forget about it being anti-medicine, anti-science, it's just antisocial -- it's just rude. It's just rude."
Steele agreed, saying it showed a lack of concern for others -- whether they declined to get the shots or had been vaccinated but refused to say that -- and demonstrated their continued fealty to former president Donald Trump.
"I suspect that a lot of those members have gotten vaccinated, but they're playing the political card and saying, you know, I'm not going to tell you," Steele said. "I mean, it's the easiest thing in the world. 'Yeah, I got vaccinated, you should get vaccinated, too.' What's so hard with that sentence? What's so hard with that reality? Well, it doesn't play into the Trumpian narrative, and it doesn't play into this idea of you've stoked people in a certain direction, you've pushed them toward a cliff, and guys, we don't want to go that way. We don't want to play that way. We don't need to go down that road. The reality of it is, people's lives, those members who work on the Hill, your staff, people in the neighborhoods and communities in which you live. I mean, you're leaders, you set the example, and yet at every turn, they seem to shy away from that leadership moment."
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