John Boehner thinks Steve King is crazy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll recall that Iowa Republican Steve King made some remarkably bigoted comments about the children of undocumented immigrants the other day -- essentially that most of them are drug mules.

There's no doubt that many Republicans find this sort of thing offensive and are embarrassed by it, but rarely do they actually call out their own.

But House Speaker John Boehner, to his credit, has apparently had enough of this wacko, and he's basically telling him to shut the fuck up:

Boehner on Thursday called his comments about illegal immigrants "deeply offensive and wrong."

"What he said does not reflect the values of the American people or the Republican Party," the speaker said.

I would agree with the first part, but the second part is open to question. Certainly most Americans do not share such bigotry, but who is more in tune with the values of the Republican Party, Boehner or King?

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There's no Tea Party rift

By Frank Moraes 

Ed Kilgore reflected yesterday on the fact that the only real ideological divide in the Republican Party is over national security. That is true, although even Rand Paul has shown himself to be nothing is not malleable when it comes to ideology. But it is true that a large bipartisan minority voted for an amendment to the half-trillion-dollar defense authorization to restrict the NSA's ability to collect telephone metadata on U.S. calls. The final vote was 205-217, so it only barely lost.

Kilgore speculated that there would have been more Democratic votes for the amendment if a Republican had been in the White House. Of course that's true. Even still, I'm pretty happy with the party; they voted in favor of the amendment 111-83 -- that's 57% of the caucus on a bill where the leadership and the White House were very vocal about how it would mean the end of free society and would effectively mean the terrorists won.

On the Republican side, Kilgore is less certain about how the White House control affected the vote. As it was, while Republicans voted for the amendment in large numbers, they did not have a majority. The vote was 94-134 -- that's just 41%. I suspect that had a Republican been in the White House, that number would have gone down to perhaps 30%.

The main question is why some Republicans care about privacy issues while others do not. Kilgore noted, "I certainly haven't figured out any consistent principle... that makes it possible to predict which fire-eating Tea Party conservative these days is frothing for an immediate war with Iran and perhaps domestic profiling of Muslims, and which is worried about excessive overseas commitments or domestic surveillance." For example, Michele Bachmann and Steve King both voted against the amendment.

I think what explains this is the same thing I've been arguing for years: the Tea Party is no kind of small-government libertarian movement. It has always been just a branding campaign for the Republican base. But because all of their supposed worship of the founding fathers, "Tea Party" is a moniker that appeals to libertarian minded politicians. But these people don't get elected because of their isolationist leanings; they get elected because they are against abortion rights and are no-tax ideologues.

So that is what defines the Tea Party. Beyond that, we can generally say that they are supporters of big military and big surveillance. Some of them (a distinct minority) do have libertarian leanings. But that's not what the Tea Party movement is all about because that's not what the Republican Party is all about. And so it shouldn't come as a surprise that there might be small disagreements inside, because they are distinctly not what the movement is about. 

Afterword 

Note that libertarian-minded people would be crazy to vote for libertarian-"sounding" members of the Republican Party. If you care about actual libertarian policy, all you will get from such people is lip service to ideals and votes that push the country further toward a big military feudalism. Sad as it may be, the Democratic Party is far more inclined toward libertarian policy than the Republicans.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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Iowa Republican Steve King ramps up the anti-immigrant bigotry

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, some of the less extreme Republicans understand that their party has to make a concerted effort to reach out to Hispanics in order to remain electorally viable, and some of the less bigoted ones also realize that their party needs to be sincere in rebranding itself as more inclusive, even that it's good in and of itself to embrace basic decency and respect for others...

But then there are the likes of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who obviously speak for many more in the Republican Party when they ramp up the ideological extremism and blend it with unabashed bigotry, including contributing to an immigration debate that is already making Republicans look like a bunch of retrograde fools by targeting the children of undocumented immigrants:

Iowa conservative Republican Congressman Steve King said in an interview with Newsmax that for every valedictorian DREAMer who has been brought to this country by his or her family, "...there's another 100 out there who, they weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act."

Seriously -- you can watch the clip below. This guy -- a prominent Republican congressman with solid standing in the party -- says that for every one success story there are a hundred drug runners. I can't speak for Hispanics, but this doesn't appear to be a compelling appeal for their support, and one could hardly fault them for thinking that the Republican Party doesn't much care for them, you know, what with the way it vilifies them and all.

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