Representative Steve King claims that billionaires are directing the GOP leadership, especially on immigration reform.
It “seems as though that there are some deep pockets outside the Congress and inside the country on immigration that seem to be the only voices that line up the Republican House on immigration,” King said. “And those would be the only voices that line up with the Republican leadership in the House on immigration. And that would be the U.S. Chamber [of Commerce], Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Google money — and George Soros is involved in that too.”
“I’m happy to promote business, but I’m not one of those folks who’s going to be directed by billionaires and I think that’s one of the divisions we have in the Republican conference,” he added.
King is the same person who said:
Some of King’s comments on immigration have bordered on — if not actually been — absurd. ”For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” he told NewsMax last July.
But King is sadly mistaken if he thinks that he is distancing himself from the corporatocracy. If I were the kind of person to want cheap labor so I could undercut my competition, I would be happy with having a police state and deporting all 11 million illegal immigrants. If there was collateral damage, fine. I would hire these people, pay them as little as possible, and tell them that if they tried to form a union or complained to the authorities, I would turn them in and send them straight back to Mexico.
King can complain all he wants to about how the government has gotten out of control. But as long as he believes in using the police state to round up illegal immigrants, he is for the same sort of big government mentality that he says he's against. Creating the kind of police state that King desires entails spending billions of your taxpayer dollars on hiring more policemen, getting more border guards, creating more court systems, and hiring more judges. And it also means trampling the Constitutional right of birthright citizenship and punishing children for crimes that they did not commit.
For all his complaints about the GOP being held hostage by billionaires, King himself is a loyal member of the GOP caucus, having voted with them 96% of the time according to the Washington Post. And he himself has been a tool for the Koch Brothers, given that he has happily conducted events with Americans for Prosperity, the group that they fund. Last week, King dodged a question about whether or not he was funded by the Koch Brothers, but you can view his funding sources here. The funding shows that King receives funding directly from the Koch Brothers and receives 92% of his funding from sources outside the state of Iowa.