Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee "needs to backtrack" on his "dangerous" claim that states, not courts, have the last word over whether to carry out same-sex marriages, conservative Colorado radio host and former homeland security official Michael Brown told
Newsmax TV on Wednesday.
"It's not only a mixed message, it's a dangerous message," Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President George W. Bush, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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Earlier on "MidPoint," likely presidential candidate
Huckabee said that states do not have to start issuing same-sex marriage licenses immediately if the Supreme Court rules that gay marriage cannot be prohibited. A bill passed by lawmakers and signed by a governor or president is still required, he said.
The
high court announced on Friday that it will decide whether all same-sex couples in the U.S. have a constitutional right to marry. But, said Huckabee, "The Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being."
"Look, I've known Mike since he was governor," said Brown of KHOW 630-AM in Denver. "He's a nice guy. He’s a good guy. But if you peel that onion back, he's really saying, 'We don't care what the Supreme Court says; we're going to ignore it.' "
"That is just wrong," said Brown.
"Isn't that the exact problem we have with Obama — saying, 'I'm going to do what I want to do, irrespective of what the Constitution says?' " said Brown. "Mike needs to backtrack that quite a bit."
President Barack Obama could also stand to revise his remarks after
Tuesday's State of the Union address, said Brown.
"It was even worse than I expected," he said of the presidential speech to Congress, which Republicans panned as confrontational and divisive for its string of veto threats and a call for a tax hike that Obama knows has no chance of passage.
Obama is still ignoring the historic result of a midterm election that did not just hand the Senate to Republicans, said Brown.
"After this wave election, do you know he has lost more Democratic House seats and more Democratic senators since the Eisenhower administration?" said Brown. "Do you know that there are 900-plus legislative seats across the entire United States that went Republican in that wave election?
"You would've thought that when he asked for bipartisanship, which we expected him to do after getting his butt beat like that, that he would've been a little more contrite," said Brown. "But he was truly even more arrogant than I even thought he could be."
One veto threat leveled by Obama was at a bill to impose new economic sanctions on Iran for not abandoning its nuclear weapons program. Obama has accused Congress of meddling in delicate U.S.-led negotiations aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Brown praised House Speaker John Boehner for
inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
"I don't think he did anything wrong at all," said Brown. "In fact, I would say, finally it seems that John Boehner is unlike the Patriots: His certain body parts are fully inflated by doing that, and I’m glad he did."
Brown was alluding to an NFL inquiry into whether the New England
Patriots used deliberately deflated footballs on Sunday in their AFC Championship game rout of the Indianapolis Colts.
"If the NFL is going to have all of this stuff about domestic abuse and everything else, they ought to stand tall when it comes to playing by the rules and not cheating," said Brown.
The Super Bowl-bound Patriots "ought to at least have some draft picks tossed" if the probe finds they cheated by using deflated balls to provide extra grip, said Brown.
"There ought to be some consequences," he said. "Otherwise we’re teaching the child that screams and whines all the time, 'You still get what you want.' "