Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who complained earlier this year that criticism of now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was part of a “war on whites,” said last month that a Democratic colleague’s criticism of a set of GOP anti-immigration bills amounted to “racism.”
Brooks spoke with Detroit radio host Frank Beckmann on June 29 at a radio row event hosted by the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform about comments that Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois had made criticizing a set of anti-immigrant bills that the House passed at the end of June.
Saying that some on the “conservative side” refer to Gutierrez “jokingly” as “Gutter-eez,” Brooks said that the Democratic congressman and others in his party are trying to “divide us based on ethnicity or skin color or perhaps chromosomes”:
Well, Luis Gutierrez knows only one argument on public policy issues, and that’s racism. So it doesn’t make any difference what you’re talking about, he’ll try to reduce it down to a racist argument. And that’s most unfortunate, but that’s something the Democrats do on a regular basis, where they try to divide us based on ethnicity or skin color or perhaps chromosomes, whether you’re a guy or a girl, all those different things. And Luis Gutierrez is one of the best, or worst, depending on your point of view, of trying to promote the kind of racism that unfortunately permeates so much public policy debate.
Rep. Steve King, the author of much of the immigration language that passed the House, was similarly upset with Gutierrez, saying that the Democratic congressman was “inflaming Hispanics unnecessarily.”
