On Wednesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, commentator Ann Coulter doubled down on the headline of her latest column by calling Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio the Jack Kevorkian of the GOP.
Asked by host Sean Hannity whether she was for real in her article “If the GOP is this stupid, it deserves to die,” the conservative firebrand proudly owned the column.
“Yes, that’s the headline of my excellent column this week, which I highly recommend everyone read,” Coulter said. “It’s just — you talk about Chuck Schumer. Well, Chuck Schumer is playing Marco Rubio, the Jack Kevorkian of the Republican Party. If this amnesty bill goes through — and it is amnesty — step one, is legalization. Everything after that, all the triggers to citizenship are phony triggers. There doesn’t have to be a fence. There doesn’t have to be E-verify. There just has to be Department of Homeland Security assuring us they have a plan.”
Hannity contested Coulter’s assumption that border security would come before legalization, citing an interview he had with the Florida senator on his radio show earlier in the day. Coulter, the author of “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” dismissed Rubio’s claim and cited Schumer’s own preference for legalization over enforcement.
Hannity presented a hypothetical that has been floated about splitting the Senate version of the immigration bill in the House and having two separate votes — one on border enforcement and another on so-called legalization. That led to a back-and-forth between the two conservative opinion leaders.
HANNITY: Let’s say for example we can bifurcate the bill and control the border first — what would Ann Coulter do with the 11 million people who did not respect the laws and sovereignty and came here legally?
COULTER: This is a total fraud and a fig leaf that American people can’t sleep at night because the situation is the exactly the same today as it was in 1987.
HANNITY: You’re not answering my question.
COULTER: It’s been 20 years —
HANNITY: You’re like a liberal
COULTER: No, nothing —
HANNITY: You’re not answering my question.
COULTER: To the contrary, you are like a liberal making a silly argument.
HANNITY: I’m teasing.
COULTER: It’s a straw-man argument. Nobody cares.
HANNITY: Hang on.
COULTER: This idea that it’s an emergency, it’s a crisis is preposterous.
HANNITY: Ann, hang on a second..
COULTER: The same thing will happen that’s happening now.
HANNITY: No. what I’m arguing you is if we don’t secure our border, we have major national security problem.
COULTER: Yeah.
HANNITY: I’m asking you because the House is talking about bifurcating the two provisions. Control the border —
COULTER: That would be a disaster.
HANNITY: — get it totally secure, verified, secure 100 percent. Then, if that happened and it’s hypothetical, what would you do with the 11 million people after?
Coulter remained steadfast on the idea that splitting the bill would be a disaster.
“Then we’d have this other bill,” Coulter replied. “OK, in the abstract, that would be a fine idea. First we request 100 percent enforcement of E-verify — 100 percent. They could do that now. If the Congress were serious about enforcing the border, they would demand enforcement of E-verify now. They would build the fence right now. The fence is not some new technology. It’s been around since the middle ages. But at this point, because of the House and these Jack Kevorkians of the Republican Party like Kelly Ayotte, who I hope gets a primary opponent, and Marco Rubio, who I hope gets a primary opponent, and the rest of them, they’re going to pass an amnesty bill. If the House passes anything — this very important, Hannity viewers, so pay attention here — if the House does nothing but say, enforce E-verify, it goes into the conference between the two bodies and it will come out an amnesty bill. At that point if it’s voted on in the House and in the Senate, we have amnesty. The country is over and the only thing we have left for me and you to do, Sean, is to punish the people who destroyed America.”
