Meadows: Time to ‘eject’ lawmakers who don’t back Trump

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, called for voters to replace lawmakers who refuse to support President Trump’s agenda.

Speaking on Friday to a friendly crowd at a Christian conservative policy conference in Washington, D.C., Meadows painted the image of a president who is outworking members of Congress.

“Don’t you think it’s time that Congress quits talking and starts doing? Isn’t it time?” he said at the Family Research Center’s Values Voter Summit.

“If we don’t get behind this agenda, the ‘America first’ agenda, it is time that you send us home.”

Meadows continued by making an analogy to a dud shell in a shotgun — you can either keep shooting the same shell in the hopes it might miraculously work, he said, or eject the shell from the chamber and start shooting with a new one.

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“I would suggest we have some members that are duds, that have been left in the chamber too long, and it is time we eject them,” he said to strong applause from the crowd.

Meadows’s warning comes amid a simmering clash in the GOP over whether current Republicans in Congress are doing enough to support the president, typified by a group led by former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon eying primary challenges against Republican incumbents across the country.

Meadows recently dispatched his political adviser to Alabama to work with Bannon and his allies on securing a victory for Roy Moore, the controversial former judge who defeated establishment-backed Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) in last month’s GOP primary runoff for a special Senate election.

Moore’s win invigorated the anti-establishment wing of the GOP to push ahead with their ambitious primary challenges.