Rep. Steve King says that President Barack Obama has a "messiah complex" in his willingness to break the boundaries of the Constitution and potentially grant unilateral amnesty to illegal immigrants — and that Congress must be ready to fight him.
"The moment that he might do such a thing, there has to be an immediate and adversarial response,'' King said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show'' on
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"That is what they want, by the way, and I don't want to play into their hands. If the American people get their back up, that will backfire on them, and that is what it takes.''
While King says he is not yet ready to call for impeachment, he says the commander in chief may want that, to become a martyr in the eyes of his supporters.
"I just started to digest the thought process of what it would be like to think that, well, I'm the president of the United States, and go ahead and impeach me and that'll make me a martyr,'' King said.
"It's part of the messiah complex that that president has . . . The most extreme narcissist you could ever find would be somebody that would say, 'Go ahead and crucify me in the House of Representatives, but I've got eternal life in the United States Senate.
'''So, it'll make me into the martyr that I need to be, and history will look at me benevolently and kindly and we will put tens of millions of illegal aliens into America who are undocumented Democrats and we will start the process to document them and thereby convert America into a leftist state in perpetuity.'''
King said Americans must rise up and demand a stop to the president's unyielding use of executive power.
"What our Founding Fathers did, sort this out in the Constitution among the three branches of government,'' King said.
"When there is a power struggle between the three branches of government, you're not always going to settle that in accord or with the appropriation or with impeachment.
"The American people are going to settle it, and that's the balance that's there. If the American people are apathetic . . . the president's going to deliver to us what he wants to deliver.
King, an Iowa Republican and a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, said he thinks Obama has "significant disrespect for the Constitution'' — and on purpose
It is not just dumb floundering around that results in this. This is calculated,'' he said.
"He put the best attorneys possible together to figure out how far he could go with this amnesty, and they decided that as long as criminal charges are not going to be brought against the president . . . as long as he's not going to have to serve hard time, they're going to push it beyond the limit.''
King predicted Obama will attempt to grant blanket amnesty in the sleepy congressional month of August.
"They're getting ready to do this, and right now I'll tell you it's likely that they do, it's likely that they do sometime. I'm going to pick the week, the third week in August,'' he said.
"It's when Congress isn't in session, it's about as far away as you can get from Congress coming back into the session.
"It's just kind of a halfway point of the office break, and they think that things will die down by the time we get back in town in September and that we're unlikely to come back here and do anything, and furthermore, what can Congress do to stop this?''
King acknowledged that Republicans are "slim on the options'' they have.
"We went through a government shutdown last fall. We just simply said we're not going to fund Obamacare, [and] the president shut the government down,'' he said.
"A couple of dozen Republicans decided they didn't want to go through any more of the stress and tension, and so they were prepared to join with Democrats and the government got opened back up again and the president was able to dish the blame off elsewhere.
"So, controlling the budget isn't a very good tool, and we don't have a tool that actually works. Our Founding Fathers didn't devise one for us because they did not imagine that we would have a president who would take his oath of office and decide that he would just simply violate it at will and refuse to enforce the laws that he doesn't like.''
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