The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: The King and Iowa

More politicians condemn the latest comments from Steve King, the controversial Iowa congressman facing a tough reelection come November. Plus: ICE’s Ken Cuccinelli has always been a hardliner.

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What We’re Following Today

It’s Wednesday, August 14.

What Steve King Said: Several 2020 presidential candidates have called Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa to resign after King said at a conservative gathering that humanity might not exist if not for rape or incest. It’s hardly the first of inflammatory comments from King, and as I reported last week, he’ll be facing a tough primary next November.

Who Is Ken Cuccinelli?: The acting Citizenship and Immigration Services Director took to the media to defend the Trump administration’s latest crackdown on legal immigration, in one instance suggesting a rewrite of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge,” he told NPR.

But Cuccinelli has always been an immigration hardliner, Elaina Plott reports: “His background includes trying to eliminate birthright citizenship, questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and proposing to make speaking Spanish on the job a fireable offense.”

Religious Rollback: A new Trump administration proposal, announced today, would give more leeway to faith-based organizations that receive contracts of the Labor department to make hiring or firing decisions based on religious beliefs. It’s another example of the Trump White House hacking away at the Obama legacy, Emma Green writes, and “while administrative rulings may not be the sexiest part of governance, they can have an extraordinary effect on the hundreds of thousands of contractors that work with the federal government each year.”

— Elaine Godfrey

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Snapshot

(Mike Segar / Reuters)

A crowd of supporters of a religious exemption to childhood vaccination rally outside the New York State Supreme Court after a hearing challenging the constitutionality of the state legislature's repeal of the exemption.

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Ideas From The Atlantic

Don’t Ban Assault Weapons—Tax Them (Saul Cornell)
“Surely even the most die-hard gun-rights supporter could not argue that, although it is constitutional to tax weapons and ammo to protect animals, it is not constitutional to tax them to protect people.” → Read on.

Obama Warned Trump—But He Didn’t Listen (David A. Graham)
“Relationships between the classes, once mediated through the household, are now managed through an app that serves a large metro area. The workers of the new servant economy don’t live with their employers, but rather sleep many miles away where they can afford a bedroom.” → Read on.

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What Else We’re Reading

Stacey Abrams says she’s open to being vice president for any Democratic nominee (Astead Herndon, The New York Times)

Millennials, rappers, and revolution: Inside Bernie Sanders’s playbook for winning the black vote (Peter Savodnik, Vanity Fair)

Democrats need to stop running scared on foreign policy (David Ignatius, The Washington Post)

California's Trump tax return law raises fears of Republican lockout (Jeremy B. White, Politico)

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About us: This newsletter is a daily effort from The Atlantic’s politics writer Elaine Godfrey, with help from Christian Paz. It was edited by Saahil Desai.

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