Rep. Ted Yoho, the Florida Republican who helped lead yesterday’s unsuccessful revolt against John Boehner’s re-election as House speaker, warned after the vote that attempts by the House GOP leadership to punish defectors by removing them from committee posts are akin to communist oppression.
“We’ve grown up in a country that honors free speech,” Yoho told WorldNetDaily’s Radio America. “If I can’t speak what’s on my mind, if I can’t do what the people of my district sent me up here [to do] and have that voice of dissension without fear of retribution, I’m not in a free country. That would be something you would expect in China, Cuba or any other communist country.”
Yoho also suggested that several GOP House members told him that they would join him in opposing Boehner but ended up voting for the speaker’s re-election.
He told host Greg Corombos that “there are members that said ‘if you hit twenty votes, we’ll jump on and vote with you, but if you don’t have that many we’re not going to,’ and when we hit that, you can’t find them.”
