Can the GOP part with America’s ugly past and present?

OPINION

There are parts of Louisiana that can truly be described as the underarms of America, and it’s not because of those sweltering swamps well off the freeways of the Bayou State.

If you’re black or Latino, good luck. Better to claim your mother was raped and that you actually belong to the Dixie Rangers Knights of the Ku Klux Klan or that you are a distant second cousin to David Duke.

SEE ALSO: House Majority Whip Steve Scalise once addressed white supremacists

After all, everyone in Louisiana knows who David Duke is. He’s a man who gives that good state a bad name and won’t die or be eaten up by gators in those swamps. Everyone knows who David Duke is. Everyone apparently but Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican Congressman who is the majority whip in the House of Representatives and claims he doesn’t know that Duke is Louisiana’s best known breathing member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Duke actually claims to be a “former leader” of the Klan, but membership in the Klan is like having been baptized Roman Catholic. You’re a Klansman for life. In Duke’s case he simply changed hoods by founding a group called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO.

A rose by any other name, though: EURO is to the Klan what the super conservative faction Opus Dei is to the Catholic Church.

EURO is a white supremist group and the last thing responsible leaders of the Republican Party want any part of publicly as they prepares to run both house of Congress and launch a credible campaign to recapture the presidency in 2016.

But that is what the GOP is now saddled with: The image of a lily white, privileged political party with no room beyond tokenism for Latinos, blacks and other minorities is now again branded as a sanctuary for racism and white supremacy.

For that, they can thank Congressman Steve Scalise who Monday acknowledged that he spoke at a gathering hosted by David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization in 2002 Scalise was a member of the Louisiana legislature at the time, and it’s not like David Duke was a stranger to the state capitol. He served in the Louisiana legislature from 1989 until 1992.

That Steve Scalise didn’t know the group was a front for David Duke is like saying someone doesn’t know that Rudolph is one of Santa’s reindeer.

“It’s hard to believe, given David Duke’s reputation in Louisiana, that somebody in politics in Louisiana wasn’t aware of Duke’s associations with the group and what they stand for,” Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro told the Washington Post.

“If that’s the case and he agreed to join them for their event, then I think it’s a real test for Speaker Boehner as to whether congressman Scalise should remain in Republican leadership.”

And that’s the point. Steve Scalise has no credibility left and should be removed from his position as majority whip.

It shouldn’t be a Democratic congressman demanding that. It should be Republican lawmakers, especially those like Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz who have presidential ambitions and whose credibility is damaged by Scalise’s leadership presence — and will be hurt even more so if they stand by and do or say nothing.

SEE ALSO: GOP scrambles for response to Obama on immigration

In fact, the Republican Party and all its wannabe nominees – the Rand Pauls, the Jeb Bushes and the like – should all insist on Scalise stepping down or his removal from that House post.

Otherwise, it’s just another example of the GOP taking two steps back for every step it takes forward in mending its fences with a New America that no longer needs to live in the country’s arm pits.

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