Good news, America: you can stop worrying about where to put your town’s immigrant gallows now. Right-wing talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who has called for hanging undocumented immigrants in the public square and making their families pay for it, has decided she’d rather not go to Washington to work as the chief of staff for newly-elected Republican Representative Allen West of Florida.
The reason? What she calls an “electronic lynching” — that is, a wave of blog posts highlighting the offensive and extreme remarks she’s made over the years.
Apparently, for Kaufman, suggesting that we hang people in public for crimes is just fine, but some bloggers reporting that Kaufman thinks that it’s just fine is criminal. Can’t make this stuff up. The real question is this: why is a seemingly-gutsy radio host so afraid to defend her beliefs — beliefs her boss appears to share — on Capitol Hill?
But just because Kaufman herself won’t be in Washington come January doesn’t mean her views won’t be well-represented all the way up the Congressional food chain — from freshman members of Congress (like her boss) to chairs of Congressional committees. With anti-immigrant ringleaders Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA) in charge of the House Judiciary Committee and Immigration Subcommittee, respectively, you can bet that anti-immigrant rhetoric will have a heck of a bully pulpit on Capitol Hill in the next Congress.
