Newt Gingrich: Poor kids 'have no habits of working ... unless it's illegal'

Newt Gingrich really must think he has a winner with this child janitors thing, since he keeps going back to it. Speaking in Iowa Thursday:

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich said.

“They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”

Whereas rich children have worked their fingers to the bone for everything they have.

Seriously, though, in this case Gingrich is much more clearly race-baiting. He's been race-baiting all along with this line of argument, but here he drops the phony "this would empower kids to succeed" line and just goes for the most thinly veiled possible iteration of "lazy ghetto black people are raising lazy ghetto black child drug dealers," and those children—who he has now established to his own satisfaction deserve no rights or legal protections—should be put right to work scrubbing toilets in the schools they attend. This is what a Republican presidential candidate on the upswing chooses to help him continue his ascent.