Asshole:
North Dakota's GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer volunteered support on Wednesday for chain-link fences in facilities where the government is detaining migrant children, comparing their use to playgrounds and ballparks.
Cramer, who is running to unseat North Dakota's Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, made his comments in a pair of radio interviews on Wednesday where he said he wanted broad immigration revisions, funding for President Donald Trump's wall and an end to family separation at the border.
When the topic came up in an interview on
KTGO's "What's on Your Mind," Kramer spoke about the merits of bills before the House this week and started talking about fences where children are detained.
"By the way, chain-link fences are around playgrounds all over America, all over North Dakota," Kramer said.
He continued, "And the chain-link fences allow line of sight visual connectivity with children and families. There's, you know, there's nothing inhumane about a chain-link fence. If it is, then every ballpark in America is inhumane."
And it gets worse:
Cramer doubled down on his comments when asked about them later in the day on WDAY, another local radio station, calling the focus on the cages “hoopla.”
“I think [chain] linked fences is irrelevant to the crying of children. My commentary is on the chain-link fence,” he said when asked about the comments and whether he’d heard the audio of children wailing after being separated from their parents. “There’s all this hoopla, because I think there are people on the left that clearly want the country to fail at this. And they would like the chain-link fence, they called it ‘dog cages.’ Well, chain-link fences have been used to protect children from predators on playgrounds, baseball diamonds, all sorts of sports courts and what-not. To me it’s not the chain-link fence, that’s not the issue. That’s a ruse by some on the left to try to create an image that’s far worse in description than it is in reality,” he said.
“The actual value of the chain-link fence is you could see through it, that’s the value of the chain link. If they put up a sheet rock wall between the children and the workers, the people there to protect them, to me that would be far worse,” Cramer continued. “The chain link fence, let’s not use that as some sort of a weapon. There’s a broader conversation about the separation of families in general, but as I’ve said before, that happens throughout the country many times. Kris [his wife] and I have been foster parents. We know all about the separation of children from their parents who do the illegal things, it happens in every city of the country every day.”
Kudos to U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D. ND) for being on the right side of this issue:
Let’s make Cramer pay at the polls for his stupid remarks. Click here to donate and get involved with Heitkamp’s re-election campaign.