Sen. Mark Kirk has some explaining to do, again, after being overheard on an open microphone calling Sen. Lindsey Graham a "bro with no ho."
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein caught the conversation between Kirk and a colleague during a vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday.
Graham, an announced candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and longtime LGBT rights opponent, famously told an interviewer asking about his sexuality in 2010, "I ain't gay." The lifelong bachelor would be the first to be elected since James Buchanan in 1856. Buchanan is considered by some historians to have been America's first gay president.
During a recent interview with the U.K's Daily Mail, Graham said he would have a "rotating first lady" who would fill the role. The comment was widely mocked by pundits and late-night comedians.
"I've been joking with Lindsey. Did you see that?" Kirk said to his colleague. "He's going to have a rotating first lady. He's a bro with no ho. That's what we'd say on the South Side."
Kirk has made racially charged comments before. Chicago's South Side is predominantly African-American.
Long before Graham recently conceded he would accept a Supreme Court decision upholding marriage equality, Kirk was an outspoken supporter of same-sex marriage. In 2013 he became only the second Republican U.S. senator, after Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, to take that stance.
Click the link below to hear Kirk's controversial remark about Graham.
