h/t the Imagine 2050 blog at Center for New Community:
Stephen Steinlight, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, along with his CIS cohorts have said some pretty outrageous things before. But this time he may really have gone too far. Speaking at the Highlands Tea Party in Sebring, Florida this weekend, Steinlight suggested that we should impeach Obama — as well as have him lynched.
In discussing Speaker Boehner’s plans to sue the President, Steinlight said that “there’s no court that’s going to stop Obama from doing anything,” adding:
We all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. Alright? And I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him…
But you know, this man who wants to rule by the use of a pen, a telephone, let us not forget his teleprompter … the fact is that it would backfire very badly and we’ve got to be grownups and accept that we can’t have everything we want, you know, [like] his head on a skewer.
Watch the video of Steinlight speaking below (starts at 37:15):
Steinlight last made major headlines just a few months ago, when he complained about religious leaders who support immigration reform and expressed his wish to take a baseball bat to them. “There would be a whole lot fewer of them around,” he told a Texas Tea Party group. Before that, he was known for arguing for a moratorium on Muslim immigration and arguing that Hispanic immigrants will “unmake” America.
Yet Steinlight’s group, CIS, remains incredibly popular with Republicans, especially the current and former chairs of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Lamar Smith (R-TX), who regularly invite(d) CIS to testify at immigration hearings. In this Congressional session, CIS staffers have testified before various House and Senate committees more than half a dozen times. Last session, the House Immigration Subcommittee alone called someone from CIS to nearly half of all their hearings. The Center for New Community estimates that CIS has testified before the House Judiciary Committee at least 40 times since 2003.
The GOP Congressional love for CIS doesn’t end there. Last summer during the Senate immigration bill markup, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — who loves to rail about the “special interests” in the immigration reform movement — brought CIS staffer Janice Kephart onboard the Senate Judiciary Committee as Special Counsel. Sessions frequently references CIS and its research in his appearances at hearings and on the Senate floor. And Bob Goodlatte has been so taken with CIS that he’s called at least two House hearings this summer as a result of CIS “data” (which they still refuse to make publicly available).
Columnist Jennifer Rubin once warned Republicans to stay away from CIS, saying “conservatives who oppose immigration reform would do well to distance themselves from such cranks, lest they be accused of sharing such views.” The aforementioned Republicans really should’ve listened, before they became associated with a guy who makes speeches about the execution of the President.
