During a friendly Fox News chat talking up the Supreme Court challenge to President Obama’s immigration executive order, Rep. Steve King got to joking about Hispanics’ improper “utilization of English” for calling him a racist. Host Neil Cavuto responded in a rather insensitive way.
King started by complaining that the pro-immigration demonstrators who heckled him outside the court did not engage in “a calm dialogue” or “a Constitutional discussion.”
A headline on the lower third blared the slur, "ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN FOCUS.”
To drive the point home, we saw a clip of King lecturing the demonstrators, “You’re supposed to be demonstrating what good citizens you would make rather than the kind of actions that you have here.”
Host Neil Cavuto couldn’t seem to understand why people might call King a racist “when, in fact, you say Congress can’t be bypassed on issues as crucial as this.” He didn’t mention King’s long record of extremism on immigration. Instead, Cavuto asked, “How did you answer this?”
King’s answer was not exactly reassuring on the not-a-racist front.
KING: I talk about the Constitution and the rule of law, American destiny, American exceptionalism, and I don’t know how they define, what race they actually define themselves as. I think most of them would say that they were Hispanic. […] I think they need to get a little more precise utilization of the English language to assert such a thing, Neil.
Cavuto “joked,” “I know a few of the Spanish words, I don’t think you can even repeat them in Spanish, so I’ll leave them out for the time being.”
Then for more totally good citizenship comments, King began attacking President Obama as, essentially, a traitor:
KING: It’s appalling to me a president of the United States would take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, be obligated to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and then simply ignore it and turn his back on it. If this court finds the president has to enforce the law, I think he’ll find another excuse not to. That’s the precarious state of our constitutional republic today.
There are respected legal minds who say President Obama’s order was completely legal, such as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. He wrote, “Obama’s actions were well within the scope of executive authority under the Constitution.”
But Cavuto never mentioned that.
Watch it below, from the April 18 Your World.