Rep. Steve King (R-IA) appeared today on Glenn Beck’s radio show, and reiterated his previous call for people to swarm the Capitol in order to stop the health care bill.
“We can beat them if we fill this capital city up full of patriotic Americans,” said King. “If tens of thousands’s pour into this city again, like they have done numerous times before, pack this capital, jam this capital, surround the place, don’t let anybody in or anybody out, they will have to capitulate. They will have to tip over their king and say, ‘We just don’t have the will to do this to the american people who despise this process.’”
Beck asked King when this should happen. “It needs to be on Saturday at noon,” said King. “If it could start today that would be great. It needs to reach its crescendo on Saturday at noon. And we need to keep that vigil up all night until Sunday, when she [Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)] plans the vote.”
In the same conversation, though, King also seemed to say that this was more about simply lobbying members of Congress as they go about their business: “They just cannot see the whites of our eyes and have the will to do this to the American people. They have to commit political suicide to vote for it, anyway. But still, to have to face their constituents the rest of their life, I don’t think they’ve got the will to do that. That’s the one thing we can do to kill this at this point.”
He also stressed that people who go inside the Capitol and the office buildings would have to follow all the rules, and even leave if they are told to do so: “They still have to go through the metal detector, and they have to behave in a respectful way. But they can still go into the offices, they can walk into the offices the members of Congress that they want to influence. If they’re asked to leave they actually should leave, because the member controls the space in his office, and should.”
At the “Code Red” rally against the health care bill on Tuesday, King previously called upon people to “Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move.” In an interview with the Huffington Post, he likened this to the Velvet Revolution that overthrew communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and compared the state of American politics to that communist tyranny.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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