Zeldin barely survived re-election in 2018, winning office again with only 51% of the vote. Back in Washington, he has returned to toadying for Donald Trump.
- January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Zeldin voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
- February 28th, 2019: Lee Zeldin votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
- March 7th, 2019: Zeldin votes against HR 183, a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism as a hateful extension of intolerance.
- March 14th, 2019: Rep. Zeldin votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
- June 4th, 2019: Zeldin votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.
- July 16th, 2019: Lee Zeldin votes against a resolution to condemn Donald Trump for his racist statements that four people of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”.
- October 23rd, 2019: Zeldin is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
- December 18th, 2019: Rep. Zeldin ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the impeachment of Donald Trump.
Perhaps our least favorite new thing to report about Lee Zeldin is that he finds one of his top priorities in Congress to just be an outright Islamophobic bigot to fellow Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who he named as his reason for voting against Congress’ condemnation of anti-Semitism because it didn’t single her out by name, and whom a few weeks later in April of 2019, he accused her of “targeting Jewish people” after she voiced criticism of Trump administration official and all-around hatemonger Stephen Miller. Rep. Omar has brilliantly responded to that line of attack by ignoring him and joining a new Black-Jewish Caucus with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Brenda Lawrence. Still, Zeldin has not relented, and has claimed her intent is to “poison” the new group.
Zeldin also was a cheerleader for Donald Trump from the very start of the impeachment inquiry into his illegal withholding of military aid for Ukraine, trying to pretend that Trump wasn’t leveraging the President of Ukraine into beginning a sham investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden (when there’s goddamn transcript of it), calling the effort to impeach a “charade”, while effectively shoving his fingers in his ears and yelling, “LALALALA” as a defense of the worst occupant of the Oval Office in our nation’s history.
We don’t know if being a hateful bag of d***s is a winning campaign strategy in the 2020 elections, but we definitely know our country will be better without men like Lee Zeldin affecting its politics.