Joni Ernst: "It’s just like Thanksgiving dinner. You make Thanksgiving dinner for your family, maybe 10 people, but a thousand show up at your door expecting Thanksgiving dinner. What do you do? You’ve only got two legs, come on. It is a crisis.”https://t.co/9JY9JUUqto
— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) July 23, 2019
Except… Thanksgiving dinner is a reminder that showing up uninvited and demanding to stay is literally America's oldest tradition.
— Jeremy Ray Jenkins (@JeremyRJenkins) July 23, 2019
The down-home, folksy variant I remember was “You’ve only got two hands”, but maybe Senator Ernst was thinking of “Four legs good, two legs better”?
Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst returned Monday from a trip to the U.S-Mexico border with a message for her constituents: “The humanitarian crisis at our southern border is absolutely real.”…
“I saw firsthand what is going on there, and what I want to get out first and foremost is that our border patrol agents are doing a tremendous job,” said Ernst, describing the men and women as “good-hearted” and “extremely compassionate.”
“They were taking dollars out of their pockets — when Democrats refused to step up and help us fund the items necessary for these areas — to pay for diapers and formula and hygiene items for the men and women that are there,” she added…
Ernst said she was told the migrants were “receiving [medical] care,” but it was obvious the system was “overwhelmed.”
“It’s overwhelmed,” Ernst said, describing her observations as she walked through the facilities. “But I felt completely safe and at ease.
“Even walking in and around the migrants, I felt comfortable,” she said. “Not all of them were in restricted areas. Some of them were sitting, waiting to be processed and some were going through their health screenings — and they all are going through health screenings. They’re being provided medical care.”…
It’s hard for the old-school mom & pop white nationalist heartland populists to compete when the national megachain moves in on their markets. Look at what’s happening to Steve ‘Pigmuck’ King, who thought he had a sinecure for life! Ed Kilgore, in NYMag, “Is Steve King Finally Running Out of Money and Luck?”:
… National Republicans would just as soon hand King an anvil and show him the nearest cliff. But he’s not going away quietly and is running for a tenth term in the House in his very conservative fourth district of Iowa. He is not, however, doing very well on the fundraising front, as the Des Moines Register noted after second-quarter reports came in:
King raised a total of almost $92,000 this period and ends the quarter with about $18,000 on hand.
In comparison, [primary opponent Randy] Feenstra raised $140,000 in the second quarter and ended it with almost $340,000 on hand.
Feenstra is a prominent state senator who is generally regarded as King’s toughest opponent among the three who are currently in the race. He is running not so much against King’s racism as against the loss of clout the state and district have suffered thanks to the incumbent’s disgrace, which is probably smart in a district where Donald Trump won 61 percent of the vote in 2016. But then again, even Trump is keeping his distance from King so far…
More likely, Trump’s handlers are doing their best to keep King well away from the Oval Office Occupant.
… In 2018, after a campaign dominated by discussion of his pithy views regarding the Lesser Breeds, King came within three points of losing to an actual Democrat, J.D. Scholten, who outspent the incumbent by nearly a four-to-one margin.
National Democrats would very much like Scholten for an encore in 2020, but he’s instead eyeing a Senate race against Joni Ernst (even as Chuck Schumer tries to clear the field for another candidate, Theresa Greenfield) — probably because the presidential race could make the fourth district a tougher climb than in 2018, and possibly because, if King loses his primary, the general election will be all but unwinnable for a Democrat (barring some third-party run by the incumbent on the White Supremacist ticket)…
More bad news for Pigmuck King: Talibangelical ‘Family Leader’ Bob Vander Plaats has endorsed King’s primary opponent Feenstra, supposedly on the grounds that King has been saying the quiet parts a little too loudly. (“In January, he tweeted that King’s comments were “a bridge too far.””) Since Vander Plaatz is supposed to have an unerring instinct for what will work for his flock, it seems like the remoras may be deserting their shark.
Local Elections Open Thread: What of Iowa’s Staunch GOP?Post + Comments (145)