Laura Ingraham: Cantor Vote Was Seen as 'Green Light' for Amnesty

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted last week because voters in his district knew that sending him back to Congress would have been a “green light” for amnesty legislation. 

Ingraham, as Breitbart News reported, campaigned for Brat and hammered Cantor for support amnesty on her daily talk radio show. Nearly 700 people came to Ingraham’s event with Brat, which was all about amnesty. She, along with Mark Levin, continued to call Cantor out for his bobbing and weaving on amnesty, and the Brat campaign credited her with infusing the campaign with the resources it needed to pull out the stunning upset. 

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Ingraham said that Cantor’s loss was a victory for “grassroots activists on the ground in Virginia” and, emphasizing how important the immigration issue was in the race, held up a campaign mailer with Cantor and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has advocated for an increase in high-tech visas even though there is no proof there is a shortage of American high-tech workers, that the Brat campaign sent during the last weeks of the campaign. She said Brat was able to appeal to working-class voters by using Cantor’s support for amnesty to tie him to other crony capitalist policies. 

“This is a picture of Eric Cantor with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook,” Ingraham said while holding up the flyer that she said told voters, “We’ve got 20 million people out of work… they want 20 million new foreign workers in the United States.”

The conservative talk radio host also pointed out to host Jonathan Karl that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) won his race by dividing the anti-Graham vote among six candidates, none of whom made amnesty and working-class issues the central points of their respective campaigns. 

She also called out Karl and the media by saying had Cantor won, they would have said it was the end of the Tea Party and a clear sign and mandate for Congress to find “common ground” on amnesty legislation that would lower the wages of American workers. 

“What we know now is that the issue of immigration is a critical issue in American politics,” she said. “Jonathan, if the results last week were that Eric Cantor won by 11 points, you would be doing This Week, saying green light to immigration reform. This race shows you the Tea Party is dead, talk radio is dead, immigration reform is dead. You wouldn’t be picking out jokes at a rally and saying this got really personal. It would be Eric Cantor is going to be working with people like Luis Gutierrez to find common ground on immigration.”

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said that it was “ridiculous” that pundits are claiming that immigration, which was the “main issue in the race,” was not a primary factor in Cantor’s defeat. Kristol has been on the airwaves saying that Republicans needed to appeal to voters who are fed up with crony capitalism and corporate welfare, which is something former Governor Sarah Palin has been saying for years, highlighted in her landmark 2011 speech in Indianola, Iowa.

Donna Brazile, the Democrat strategist who ran Al Gore’s campaign, observed that Ingraham knows how “to throw a punch.” Ingraham certainly does, for she helped KO Cantor — and perhaps amnesty legislation in this Congress — last week.