Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) said Thursday that Tea Party groups who blamed Republican losses in Tuesday's election on the party moving too far to the center were peddling "crap."
"There's a one-word phrase we use in Ohio for that: Crap. That's nonsense," LaTourette said during an appearance on CNN.
"The Republican Party cannot be a national party if we give up the entire East Coast of the United States and say we don't have any Republicans in New England, we don't have any Republicans in the mid-Atlantic states," he said. "We can't continue to dis the Latino voters."
LaTourette added that the GOP would cease to be a national party unless they “get out of people’s lives, get out of people’s bedrooms.”
"We sent them running back to the Democratic Party because they think we're nutty," LaTourette said.
The nine-term lawmaker announced in July that he would retire at the end of his term, citing a partisan environment he said made it difficult to find compromise in Washington.
On Thursday, LaTourette also bemoaned the inability of Democrats and Republicans to come together, even on legislation that ordinarily would be easily passed.
"The small things that we used to be able to do in a bipartisan way, we can’t get done and that’d be the farm bill, the transportation bill. For crying out loud, we couldn’t even agree to leave town for the election ... And that lack of willingness to find common ground on the no-brainer issues really is what put me over the edge," LaTourette said.
