Rep. Steve King likens amnesty, bank robbery
By TAL KOPAN | 12/10/13 1:25 PM EST Updated: 12/10/13 1:33 PM EST
POLITICO
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'You get to rob the bank and keep the money. That’s what amnesty really is.' | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Rep. Steve King said Tuesday that granting amnesty to immigrants in this country illegally is more than the equivalent of giving a pass to a bank robber, it’s like letting them keep the money, too.
“To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime,” King said at a Washington panel on amnesty hosted by the conservative group Judicial Watch on Tuesday. “Whatever their objective is, the advocates of amnesty are seeking to grant them their objective.”
The Iowa Republican said whether the immigrants came to the U.S. to work, to send money back home or to join family, allowing them to stay here is letting them profit off their illegal behavior.
“And it isn’t just as if amnesty for someone whom, say, might go in and rob a bank, because granting them amnesty would be when they get out on the street with the loot, you would say to them, ‘I’m going to give you amnesty, now you’re not going to be able to rob the bank anymore,’” King said. “But this is giving them the loot, too. You get to rob the bank and keep the money. That’s what amnesty really is, it’s pardon them for the crime and reward them with the objective of it. And it breaks down our culture and our civilization.”
Along with plenty of criticism for Democrats and President Barack Obama — whom King accused of setting up “one man rule” — King also accused Republican leadership of helping Democrats on the issue of immigration.
King said that despite the fact that House leadership has pledged to not conference on a Senate-passed bill that in his view amounts to amnesty, he doesn’t trust House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to live up to the promise.
He called Boehner’s hiring of former John McCain aide Rebecca Tallent as an immigration adviser as “an ominous signal.”
“That tells you that the things that they’ve been staging, and the words that have been carefully parsed, such as by the speaker, ‘I won’t conference on the Gang of Eight’s bill.’ Well that won’t really get you very far,” King said. “Any kind of bill that comes out of the House of Representatives turns into a conferenceable vehicle, and a conferenceable vehicle could come back to us with, and would, with parts of the Gang of Eight’s bill.”
King said the leadership’s actions over the past year have caused him to have little faith in the process in the House.
“[Boehner] hasn’t held to the Hastert rule several times in this last year, so this little promise — carefully listen to the words, write them down, go back to your legal dictionary, go to your other dictionary, find a way, there must be a loophole. I don’t have any confidence that they’re going to anything to set the stage to run things honest,” King said.
The congressman said Republican leaders are part of the reason Democrats are “almost universally for amnesty,” because they won’t allow the left’s ulterior motives to be revealed.
“For a lot of years, Republican leadership has tried to discourage, continues to try to discourage, active, especially elected Republicans from explaining the political beneficiaries [of amnesty] are Democrats,” King said. “Those who are unlawfully present in the United States, if given citizenship, will vote for a more liberal agenda. That erodes the rule of law further.”
King continued: “Republicans, somehow, some of them stick their fingers in their ears or their head in the sand and they disregard that, because they don’t want to talk about that reality.”
King has been a lightning rod in the past with his outspoken comments on the topic of immigration, including earlier this year when he said for every undocumented immigrant in the U.S. that’s a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
His comments were widely panned by Democrats and Republicans alike, including Boehner.
King has stood by the comments and continued to argue against immigration reform proposals that allow people in the country unlawfully to stay.
On Tuesday, he acknowledged that his side in the debate has a heavy lift ahead of them to convince the public not only against amnesty but also of “constitutional violations” by the president in his actions on immigration, in part because of the coalitions lined up on the other side.
“We might lose that debate in this country because of the sympathy factor, and it’s also added to by a lot of Christian groups who misread the scripture, and I’m happy to take on that debate with any one of those folks,” King said.
It’s the job of King and other like-minded members of Congress to keep bringing the issue and others to the public’s attention, he said, and it will eventually have results.
“This is a president who has set himself him up for one-man rule,” King said. “And at some point that realization sets in, probably when you sign up for Obamacare it’ll settle in, and at the point the revulsion should spill out in us.”
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