Hates Ronald Reagan
Now here's a conspiracy theory
I've never heard before:
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama would not be president if it weren't for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law. […]
In an effort to dissuade Republicans, King argued that the 1986 immigration bill that Reagan signed into law is estimated to have brought amnesty to three million illegal immigrants.
He said conservative estimates show that, on average, each of these people brought in five others, leading to 15 million more people in the country, most of whom voted for Obama.
"[T]hey have to admit that Ronald Reagan's signature on the '86 amnesty act brought about Barack Obama's election," King concluded on the House floor.
"Don't be decent because it will hurt our party" isn't exactly a new refrain from King, but the rest? Are we now approaching that new, oft-predicted stage of Republicanism, the part where modern Republicans call Ronald Reagan a dirty stupid hippie and start calling each other "Reaganesque" as an insult? "You bastards want to be like Ronald Reagan and bring in millions upon millions of brown people to this country! It's already a giant pain in the ass to keep brown people from voting, and you want to add
more? You damn liberal Reaganites." And then they all go defund cancer treatment for orphans or institute a new school lunch policy declaring adorable puppies to be one of the major food groups.
I've been waiting a long time for the day when the party would finally ditch Ronald Reagan himself as being a stain on true batshit crazy conservatism. I still thought it'd take a bit longer than this, though. Then again, I also never really thought "batshit crazy" would really become the GOP's dominant long-term electoral philosophy; predicting the direction these gasbags will float once you've untied their last mental strings remains a damn tricky thing.