President Donald Trump's Twitter swipes at four left-wing Democratic congresswomen, telling them to "go back' to the countries they were "originally from" served to "inflame the worst of our instincts," Sen. Angus King said Monday.
The Maine Independent senator told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the first thought he had when he heard about the tweets was from Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Senate hearings in the 1950s, when attorney Joseph N. Welch asked the senator "at long last, have you no decency, sir?"
"You keep saying this is the end of the line, but it never is," said King. "Particularly (from) a guy whose mother was an immigrant, his grandparents were immigrants, his wife is an immigrant...to say go back to your country, everyone in America is from somewhere else except the native Americans."
King also on Monday discussed a bill he backs to help migrant children who are being held in detention centers, saying it should be called the "bill that should never even have been necessary."
"It basically calls for humane treatment of children at the border," he said. "We can argue about what the policy should be for the border, but once people are here, particularly children, we have a fundamental obligation to treat them humanely. It drives me nuts that we have to pass legislation saying give kids toothbrushes, don't separate them from their family."
King said his bill requires that before families can be separated, there has to be an official finding that the children are entering the country with someone who is not related. It also sets minimum standards for the items needed for humanitarian treatment and restricts for-profit facilities from being the ones that handle children.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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