Craziest Republican of the Day: Steve King

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Let's welcome back our CRD series with an old CRD favourite, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, one the GOP's most awesome congressmen. By my quick count, it's his sixth appearance as CRD. The previous for were for:

-- Introducing legislation recognizing the "importance of Christmas and the Christian faith";

-- Saying that same-sex marriage is part of "a push for a socialist society" in America;

-- Saying that he "empathized" with the suicide bomber who attacked an IRS office in Texas;

-- Saying that Obama "favors the black person"; and

-- Saying that there are babies "in garbage cans around this country" that don't receive health care.

And then there was the time we noted his bigoted idiocy.

What lands King in this spot again today?

Appearing at the Values Voters bus tour in Iowa yesterday, King said that it would be okay to ask people in hospital about their immigration status, that is, to determine if patients are undocumented (or "illegal," as the likes of King prefer):

I don't know why that would be too far. It depends on who is doing the asking. But I have walked through the hospitals down along the border, and I know what goes on. Tucson University Hospital, for example, is the most southerly trauma center in Arizona. The reason for that is all the rest of them had to close because they've been required to provide free medical care to people who are in the United States illegally.

So basically, even if you're a patient at a trauma center (which is pretty serious), you should be required to account for your status.

And then... what? Would King actually deny treatment to an undocumented immigrant? Or would he or she (perhaps even if he or she is a child) get some treatment and then promptly be deported?

Apparently nothing is "too far" for Steve King. Think Progress, which reported on this, provides the ugly context:

In his eight years in Congress, King has amassed a long record of castigating immigrants and Latinos in general. Last year, he declared that Rep. Raúl Grijalva's (D-AZ) southern Arizona district may have been "ceded... to Mexico." Prior to that, King called immigration a "slow-motion Holocaust." And while discussing a border fence on the House floor in 2006, King proposed electrifying it, noting that "we do this with livestock all the time."

That's right, livestock. And if undocumented immigrants (who, lest we forget, are human beings) are like livestock, then why bother giving them any medical care? However sick they may be, just throw 'em back over the electrified fence.

Once more, we see just how the Republican Party is the party of cruelty.