CNN anchor John King observed on Wednesday that Republican lawmakers will only vote for a comprehensive amnesty bill if they think Breitbart News is taking a nap and will not notice.
On his Inside Politics program, King discussed efforts by some Republican establishment lawmakers—like Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Jeff Denham (R-CA)—to force an amnesty vote on the House floor with a discharge petition.
King said the “secret, not-so-secret wink, nod of Washington” is that “there are actually enough House Republicans who would actually like to vote” for a comprehensive amnesty bill.
“However, they will only do that if they think the Breitbarts and the Fox Newses are gonna somehow be in a nap and not notice them doing it,” King said.
Breitbart News’ Neil Munro explained that “if the 17 GOP members can collect a total of 25 GOP signatures on their discharge petition, then 193 Democrats will join them to get the 218 signatures needed to stage a floor vote, despite leadership opposition.”
As Breitbart News reported, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) objected to the discharge petition on Wednesday, with McCarthy saying a discharge petition would “depress intensity” in the midterms and a Scalise spokesman telling Breitbart News that a “discharge petition is the wrong way to legislate.”
After the 2012 presidential election, Breitbart News was the lone outlet that reported relentlessly and critically on the Republican establishment’s efforts to pass a massive “Gang of Eight” comprehensive amnesty bill. Even Fox News touted the legislation and its champions like Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“God bless Fox,” Graham said then, as Joshua Green noted in Devil’s Bargain, after Rupert Murdoch “made sure the network” reflected his pro-amnesty views.
Green also detailed how difficult it was for economic nationalists and populists opposed to massive amnesty legislation to get their views represented “even in conservative alternatives like Fox News” before Breitbart News came on the scene.
Largely because of Breitbart News’ relentless reporting on all of the GOP establishment’s shenanigans, the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill’s flaws were exposed, and the bill never passed Congress.
After Breitbart Texas’ Brandon Darby broke the bombshell 2014 story about illegal immigrant children being warehoused in Texas that drove the national news cycle for weeks, “Breitbart News put the final nail in the coffin” when it came to comprehensive amnesty legislation, Green wrote. Breitbart News’ reporting also allowed upstart Dave Brat to defeat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a primary, sending shockwaves across the country as Cantor became the first sitting Majority Leader to be ousted in a primary.
Breitbart News’ relentless reporting on immigration put pro-amnesty candidates like Rubio and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush behind the proverbial eight ball during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries and allowed Donald Trump to ride the immigration issue all the way to the White House.
In fact, as Breitbart’s Joel Pollak has noted, even though establishment talking heads like Hugh Hewitt, showing how completely out of touch they have been with the GOP base, advised Republicans to ignore “sanctuary cities” right after Kate Steinle was murdered in a sanctuary city, Breitbart News reported extensively on Steinle’s death and then-candidate Trump’s meetings with families whose loved ones were murdered by illegal immigrants.
Though establishment cheerleaders like Hewitt claimed that illegal immigration only resonated with a “small slice” of the GOP electorate, Trump rocketed from seventh in the RealClearPolitics average of the polls to first just a week after he met with victims of illegal immigrant crimes in July of 2015. And it was a lead that Trump did not relinquish en route to the GOP presidential nomination.