(Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suffered an embarrassing setback Tuesday after Republicans called her out for violating the chamber’s rules by saying President Donald Trump’s comments about four freshman House members were racist.

”These comments from the White House are disgraceful and disgusting and those comments are racist,” Pelosi had said on the House floor during debate on a proposed resolution condemning the president’s remarks as racist.

House rules prohibit calling the president a racist or saying his statements were racist. After an objection by Republican Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat who was presiding over the House, said her remarks were not in order.

The Democratic-controlled House is now voting on whether to strike her remarks from the record.

The floor dispute is part of the controversy following the president’s tweets on Sunday that the four lawmakers, all of whom are women of color, should “go back” to the countries they “originally came from,” instead of telling Americans “how our government is to be run.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Anna Edgerton

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.