TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Speaking of Planned Parenthood, Republicans in Congress still haven't defunded that group despite repeatedly promising to do so back when Obama was president. Maybe several hundred times. Back then the GOP said they would, but they haven't, and they haven't kept their promise to rebuild the wall either.
So is another broken promise really surprising? That the question Steve King of Iowa has asked himself. He has proposed this: Take away Planned Parenthood's funding and use it to build a border wall, a combination designed to offend Progressives. Does he mean it? He joins us tonight. Congressman thanks a lot for coming on.
STEVE KING: Thanks for having me on Tucker.
CARLSON: This is like a fever dream in Santa Monica. You are going to take away the Planned Parenthood federal subsidy and use it to build the border wall.
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CARLSON: So Republican leadership is not embracing this idea?
KING: They didn't embrace it right away. But they are a little slow to come to these new ideas.
CARLSON: Kind of weird though. I remember at least a year ago, the leadership was saying we want to build a wall and we want to defund Planned Parenthood. You've provided a way to do both those things simultaneously and yet they are not congratulating you or buying you a beer?
KING: You would think that they would say “boy, why didn't I think of that, let's do that right away.” Another thing on this is at the Planned Parenthood proposal, if we could even get this done, is only for a single year instead of in perpetuity, which is what I prefer. But it's worth half a billion dollars. The Planned Parenthood's government funds run about $554 million a year, and if we would just take that first half a billion out of there, apply it to the wall, and by the way the wall is way overpriced. We can build it for $10 billion or less. I've spent 42 years in the construction business. I'm not interested in building it myself, but we could do that. So there's a start on it.
And when you look at the rest of this, another thing that caught their attention was the SNAP program, or the food stamp program as we've long known it, and when you look at the numbers of that it's just astonishing. When I came to Congress in 2003, there were 19 million people on food stamps and that number elevated all the way up to 47 million, it's dialed back down to 46 million now. And forty percent of them are obese. And so we addressed the food stamp program under Lyndon Johnson, starting in about 1962, got the program in '65, and back then 13 percent of our population was obese and we were trying to solve the malnutrition problem. well we've absolutely solved the malnutrition problem, and now we have an obesity problem.
