Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas pointed his finger at “some female senators from the Northeast” for the failure of the Republican Party—which boasts a whopping five female senators—to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, saying that he would have settled this in a duel if they were men.
Appearing on the radio show “1440 Keys,” he said it was “absolutely repugnant” that the Republican-led Senate has not yet fulfilled its seven-year promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, the AP reported. “If it was a guy from south Texas, I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style,” he said, in reference to the duel between the third vice president of the United States and Alexander Hamilton.
Farenthold was probably referring to Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Shelley Moore Capito, who helped scuttle the Senate’s repeal-only bill last week. “I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” Capito said in a statement.
Republicans, despite controlling all three branches of government, have been unable to pass several Obamacare replacement bills due to divisions within their own party. To scapegoat the few women in the party—who were, by the way, all excluded from the working group that crafted the legislation—shows that the GOP’s gender imbalance is more than just an optics problem.