Establishment Republican Senator Roger Wicker is in the hot seat after comments he recently made about teenage female Senate pages.
The controversy erupted after Wicker called the teens, who essentially act as interns within the chamber, “beautiful” in a conversation with Sen. Cory Booker that was caught by CSPAN cameras.
Wicker, who is close with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is already likely to face an extremely difficult fight for re-election in Mississippi against Chris McDaniel, and these comments don’t help his case. McDaniel, a former State Senator who nearly beat Sen. Thad Cochran in 2014, is extremely popular with conservative voters in the state.
According to The Daily Mail:
“Mississippi GOP Sen. Roger Wicker has been caught on C-SPAN video calling teenage Senate pages ‘beautiful girls’.
Wicker was chatting to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who mentioned a page of the short term spending bill, where it talks about one of the most beautiful places in the country.
‘I thought you were going to say this was one of the most beautiful girls,’ Wicker told him in the C-SPAN video.
‘What about these others?’ he said, gesturing towards a group of female Senate pages – typically high school juniors who spend a semester interning at Congress – as Booker laughed in response.
Wicker insists his off the cuff remark was ‘meant as a light-hearted jest,’ his spokesperson Ryan Taylor told the New York Daily News.”
