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GOP Doesn’t Flog Immigration in House Health Care Vote—King Asks, Where’s the Wedge?

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KingIn the aftermath of Saturday’s landmark passage of a health care reform bill in the House of Representatives, many Republican Members of Congress are scratching their heads and wondering how they could have allowed the bill to pass. They are questioning why their leadership didn’t agree to use the immigration issue to kill the bill by offering a tough anti-immigrant amendment at the end of debate.

As Roll Call reports, “conservative Republicans were perplexed and angry Monday that their leaders decided not to force Democrats into a tough immigration vote that they believe could have brought down the bill.” Chief among these conservatives decrying his leadership’s decision is Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who stated:

“I wanted to put everything into killing the bill. I wasn’t interested in anything that had later political calculations. Whenever you get something this bad, when you have a chance to kill it, you have to kill it.”

Clearly, Rep. King is not interested in strategies with “later political calculations” — if so, he wouldn’t have designed his party’s horrendous Latino and immigrant scapegoat strategy that is threatening to turn the GOP into a regional party for the foreseeable future.