During the same event at which Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) made a joke about “public hanging,” the senator misidentified former Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) as a senator from Oklahoma.
“Many of you may have heard of Sen. Henry Hyde from Oklahoma,” Hyde-Smith said, according to a video published Sunday by the Jackson Free Press. “That was a distant relative. He put in a bill many years ago that we could never use federal funding to fund abortions.”
Hyde was not a senator from Oklahoma — he was a congressman representing Illinois who helped craft the well-known Hyde Amendment, which bars the federal government from spending taxpayer money to fund abortions.
The full video of Hyde-Smith’s remarks follows a series of missteps from the Republican senator who faces a tight runoff race for her Senate seat on Tuesday. She has recently come under fire for jokes about “public hanging” and vote suppression. Photos that surfaced last week also showed Hyde-Smith posing in confederate soldier garb at a museum honoring Jefferson Davis.
