According to Buzzfeed this morning, Steve King isn’t done with his DREAMers-are-drug-runner comments yet.
Saturday on Fox News, King said that an anonymous border patrol agent said that his recent comments–that most DREAMers are drug runners with “calves the size of cantaloupes”–were maybe off by ten pounds. As King said:
I got a call from them yesterday, and I said, ‘Did I need to come back down and refresh myself?’ They said, ‘No, you’re spot on with what you’re saying but maybe you got the weight ten pounds up.
King also said that many of his GOP colleagues had told him that he was correct, but that due to the “repercussions”, he wasn’t asking them to step forward. As Think Progress quoted:
My colleagues are standing by me. They come up to me constantly and talk to me and say, you’re right, I know you’re right…
You know, they have a lot at stake here. There is a leverage within the House of Representatives and they all need to be concerned about their own leverage, so I’m not asking them to step forward, I wouldn’t ask them to step forward. I don’t want them to take repercussions.
Unfortunately for the House GOP, there are already enormous repercussions. As commentators this entire last week have noted, actions speak louder than words. House Republicans like John Boehner and Eric Cantor have been going out of their way to distance themselves from Steve King’s remarks, but the fact is that almost every House Republican voted with Steve King on an amendment to deport DREAMers just last month. And a new report from American Bridge shows that on votes about immigration, a majority of the House GOP caucus sides with Steve King almost 90% of the time.
These are hard things for House GOPers who want to distance themselves from Steve King to explain. When it comes to attracting Latino, minority, immigrant, and moderate voters, there are already huge repercussions for the House GOP for being a do-nothing party that has Steve King as a member of its caucus. And that problem is exacerbated every time Steve King opens his mouth. Apparently, he’s determined to keep doing so, and determined to keep his latest controversy very much alive.
