By Albert Lin
In a talk to the Highlands Tea Party in Sebring, Fla., last week, a Center for Immigration Studies analyst said that no punishment is too harsh for President Obama.
While discussing House Speaker John Boehner’s plan to sue the President, CIS Senior Policy Analyst Stephen Steinlight told the crowd, “We all know, if there ever was a President that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy, all right” Through loud applause, he added: “And I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung [sic], drawn and quartered is probably too good for him.”
Steinlight went on to say, “But you know, this man who wants to rule by the use of a pen, a telephone, let us not forget his teleprompter The fact is that it would backfire very badly and we’ve got to be grown-ups and accept that we can’t have everything we want, you know, [like] his head on a skewer.”
CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian told The Huffington Post that Steinlight had been given a slap on the wrist. “I reprimanded him and put a reprimand in his personnel file,” Krikorian said. “Steve sometimes has used impolitic language and I admonished him to choose his words more carefully in the future.”
The Center for Immigration Studies claims to be a “non-partisan research organization,” but its work is frequently cited by Republicans and its publications have a decidedly anti-immigration stance.
Steven Camarota, Director of Research at the CIS, distanced the organization from Steinlight’s comment. “Steve was speaking figuratively and hyperbolically, obviously, for effect. In that respect his intemperate comments were similar to those who are often critics of President Bush, and I would say like those comments, they are ill-advised,” Camarota told The Huffington Post. “I would also say that the Center for Immigration Studies does not in fact support drawing and quartering the President.”
Steinlight has issued plenty of charged statements before. In a March speech to a Texas Tea Party group, he said that he wanted to ban all Muslim immigrants because “Muslims believe in things that are subversive to the Constitution. I think Islam is not so much a religion as a hideous totalitarian political creed looking for world supremacy.”
In an item published on Jan. 1 of this year, Steinlight told a Washington Times blogger that giving amnesty to illegal immigrantsspecifically Latinoswould lead to “the unmaking of America. It would subvert our political life by destroying the Republican Party.”
