Bloomberg
By Dave Weigel
April 22, 2015
When
a congressman tells a constituent to back off lest he "drop his ass,"
it's news. It took only days for California Republican Steve Knight, a
freshman from the Simi
Valley, to see his confrontation with an immigration restrictionists go
viral.
"You
told me you didn't vote for amnesty, and you did," said an activist
named Mike, slapping Knight's left arm as if sarcastically
congratulating him on a job well done.
"You lied to me."
"Mike, hey," said Knight. "If you touch me again, I'll drop your ass."
“You told me you didn't vote for amnesty, and you did.”
Knight
had seemingly joined the elite club of YouTube-era
congressmen—Illinois's Phil Hare, North Carolina's Bob Etheridge—who let
their tempers get the better of them
as conservatives dogged them with questions. (Etheridge blew up and
bear-hugged a tracker who asked him if he "fully supported the Obama
agenda." Neither man is a congressman today.)
Yet
the content of the complaint might be more interesting than the taunt.
As Roll Call's Warren Rojas demonstrated—after Knight told him that he
"lost my cool and I regret
responding the way I did"—activists with Save Our State had been
appearing at Knight's events, pressing him on why he allowed "amnesty"
to happen. And in 2015, amnesty has been defined down to this: Voting
for the DHS spending package that did not nix money
for the president's 2012 and 2015 executive orders on immigration.
In
other videos, Knight has grown almost as irritated as the question as
he did in the "drop your ass" moment. A video from March finds him
arguing sarcastically with
an activists who insists that Knight lied.
"Tell me when I said I would defund the Department of Homeland Security," says Knight.
"In January you voted to defund," says the activist. "In March, you voted to fund President Obama's executive amnesty."
Several
times, the angry constituent referred to Knight breaking a pledge.
That's a reference to a 2014 promise pushed by NumbersUSA and the
Federation for American Immigration.
Any Republican who signed it agreed to oppose "reform that would grant
any form of work authorization to illegal aliens," and "increase the
overall number of guest workers."
Most
Republicans voted for versions of DHS funding that sliced out the
deferred action programs. Most Republicans (167 of them in the House, 31
in the Senate) opposed
the DHS funding package that preserved them. They included all three of
the senators now running for the GOP's presidential nomination:
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Texas
Senator Ted Cruz.
If
"amnesty" has been defined down this far, it'll be the definition used
by Republicans all year, into the presidential race. Cruz, in
particular, has proven expert at
shaming fellow Republicans for voting for "clean" funding bills, to
great enthusiasm in the GOP base.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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