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Republican Hill Staffers: Meet Your New Colleague!

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Just a quick note to our friends on Capitol Hill – the Florida Independent reports that you’ll have a fiery new colleague walking the halls of Congress, asking you to lunch and offering her, um, constructive suggestions about how to win the hearts and minds of America – including “hanging” undocumented immigrants and then “sending them back where they came from.”

Right-wing South Florida talk radio host Joyce Kaufman has just been hired as chief of staff to Rep. Allen West, Florida’s newly elected Republican Congressman from the 22nd District. West himself has some bold ideas about what’s wrong with America today and how to fix it—he told a Tea Party rally in May:

“you’ve got to stay well-informed and well-armed, because this is a tyrannical government and it starts with illegal immigration.”

So like any good chief of staff, Kaufman shares her boss’ ideas and has plans to go with them. Here’s what she said on her show in August 2007:

“If you commit a crime while you’re here, we should hang you and send your body back to where you came from, and your family should pay for it.”

She defended her statement to the Miami New Times, saying, “There’s nothing illegal about saying that people should be [hanged] in public squares for crimes.” (Retrofit the Cannon Building Terrace with a gallows, perhaps?)

Kaufman’s interest in immigration policy apparently began when she called Comcast and was offered the option to “press 2 for Spanish.”  Having been thus convinced that the end of American civilization was upon us, Kaufman set out on a crusade to warn Americans about the insidious influence of Latinos.  At a rally Kaufman attended with her new boss, she said that undocumented immigrants “want to change your way of life, and some of them may be your gardeners.”  Wow.

But while the rational world may blanch, this new Republican thought-leader will fit right in to the Lamar Smith & Steve King braintrust slated to craft immigration policy in the House for the next two years.  They want to provoke the mass expulsion of immigrants – at any cost – because, after all, gardeners are the enemy.

Oh, and about those Latino voters Republicans will need to win over before the next presidential election: go get ’em!