Dem rep: Restaurant owner should have served Sarah Sanders

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said Sunday he believes a Virginia restaurant owner should have served White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders over the weekend. 

Cummings was asked about the incident during a discussion on CBS’s “Face the Nation” of the growing incivility in politics.

“The restaurant owner should have served her,” Cummings said, referencing the decision by the co-owner of The Red Hen in Lexington, Va., to ask Sanders to leave the restaurant on Friday night. 

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“But this tone is horrible. But again, I think President Trump has created this,” Cummings added. “Since he became president and even before, he has basically given people license to state things that are ugly.” 

Cummings added that the focus should be on the issues rather than on rhetoric, but argued that the White House has not executed policies well.

Stephanie Wilkinson, co-owner of The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., told The Washington Post on Saturday that Sanders’s support of Trump administration policies banning transgender people from the military and separating families at the border was at the heart of her decision.

“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson added. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

After reports emerged that Sanders was asked to leave the restaurant, the press secretary tweeted through her government account that Wilkinson’s actions “say far more about her than about me.”

“I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so,” she added.

The incident came in the same week that protesters confronted White House aide Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen while they dined in separate instances at Mexican restaurants.