On this date, in both 2014, as well as in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day shared its first two profiles of Steve King, the sitting U.S. House Representative from Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, a guy who is perhaps the most unapologetic racist member of the GOP (and that’s saying something). Steve King is a man who seems hell bent on being the most venomous xenophobe in the entire Republican Party, showing his contempt for illegal immigrants by often comparing them to animals (considering he’s also proudly defended dog-fighting, it’s not surprising to see him hold as much concern for these human beings as he does animals), and making ludicrous, paranoid claims about how much of a threat they are to the general safety of the average American citizen. He literally has described the process of immigration in the United States as “a slow motion terrorist attack”. Years before Donald Trump ever wanted to build a border wall, Steve King was pitching a giant electrified fence that would keep out illegal immigrants because “it works on cattle”. King’s also a huge war hawk, and has defended any action by the United States in the Middle East for the past 15 years, not even taking issue with the atrocities committed in the Abu Ghraib prison by American troops. He’s equally insane on the home front, having once argued that girls are frequently kidnapped out of playgrounds, raped, then taken over state lines to get an abortion, and returned back to the park before anybody knows they’re missing. (Really. I mean, those would be some really oblivious parents, to have the kid missing long enough for a predator to pull all that off before they notice.) In 2015, Steve King chastised President Obama for “apologizing for slavery” because he feels “there’s nothing to apologize about”. He has complained about undocumented immigrants “bringing in Ebola and beheadings”, and defended Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican rapists, saying that “Central Americans were doing the raping”, in addition.
Ever the unapologetic racist, Steve King gave everyone a waft of bigotry strong enough that is was like a blast of smelling salts on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention. In the midst of participating in a panel on MSNBC moderated by Chris Hayes, Rep. King gave his thoughts on what “non-white sub-groups” had ever contributed to civilization.
“This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? Than, than Western civilization itself. It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”
The panel erupted in protest at King’s ignorant, near-white-supremacist statement, and Hayes had to dump to commercial to avoid it devolving even further than that.
That’s only the most infamous moment from Steve King. Here are the rest:
“Who we are? We should not be a suicidal nation. My wife said this morning, ‘If you had 100 grapes and you knew that two of them were fatally poisonous, would you sit there and eat the grapes until one of them killed you? Or would you decide, I’m not going to take that bunch of grapes at all?’ That’s what we’re dealing with here with the Syrian refugees.“
- February 2nd, 2016: Steve King votes for HR 3762, the 61st attempt by Congressional Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which is still working better than was predicted).
- March 9th, 2016: Rep. King, in an interview at CPAC, admits that the GOP’s blockade of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is strictly a matter of politics.
- May 16th, 2016: King loses it after the Obama administration announces they will move to support transgendered children in public schools use the bathrooms of their choice, going on a rant where he claimed ”the administration won’t be satisfied until all students are transgendered [sic] vegans” and that the country was going “downhill” because women had contraceptive rights.
- May 19th, 2016: Rep. King votes against House Amendment 1079, which would have prohibited the use of federal funds for discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. So if you were wondering, yes, he’s pro-discrimination, all right.
- June 21st, 2016: King comes up short in an attempt to hold a vote in the GOP House to block a move by the Treasury Department to have Andrew Jackson replaced on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman. He actually tried arguing it was racist and sexist for people to be campaigning to feature an African American or a woman, instead of President Jackson.
- June 22nd, 2016: Rep. King is a featured guest of anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, and talks about how “no one would have been shot” if anyone in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting had a gun (they had an armed off-duty police officer on the premises) and says that the GOP shouldn’t try and win over Hispanic voters because “we are all God’s children”.
- July 11th, 2016: It was noted in a photo taken in Steve King’s office that he proudly has the Confederate flag on display on his desk. Last time anybody checked, Iowa wasn’t in the Confederacy in the Civil War.
- September 13th, 2016: Rep. King comments about San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests against racial inequality at NFL games by kneeling during the national anthem in the way you’d expect… he went on Newsmax and accused Kaepernick of being in league with ISIS.
Steve King is seeking his eighth term in Congress in the 2016 elections, and won the GOP Primary over Rick Bertrand with 65% of the vote. He faces off against Democrat Kim Weaver in November, with Iowa’s 4th District has a +5 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and over 60,000 more Republican voters registered than Democrats in the district, she faces a tough path to victory. Then again, Steve King might be busy heading to the laundromat to pick up all his Klan hoods, and Iowa Republicans might finally be embarrassed enough by voting for an unflinching ***hole and bigot to flip the seat. Keep your fingers crossed…