In a contest for America’s nuttiest member of Congress, Iowa’s Steve King has to be at the top of the list. Steve King opposes the USDA settlement for discrimination against African-American farmers. His reasoning?
“Figure this out, Madame Speaker: We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he’s going to run for president, and what does he do?” King said. “He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim.”
He then said the claims — which stem from discrimination against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s — are “slavery reparations.”
“We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, ‘We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,'” he said. “That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim.
The Pigford claimants, he said, “They’re just filing a claim because they think they can get away with it.” Standing up against the settlements, while unpopular, he said, is “a matter of justice and equity.”
Shorter Steve King: Barack Obama is black.