Huckabee Blasts McConnell

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Wednesday he had apologized to Matt Bevin, the current GOP nominee for governor of Kentucky, for supporting Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in their Senate primary race last year.

McConnell is loathed by many of the very conservatives Huckabee desperately needs in the Republican presidential primaries, and his support for the Senate majority leader cannot be helpful to him.

Huckabee said he thought that supporting McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, rather than challenger Bevin last year would lead to passage of conservative legislation and stop President Obama’s overreach on the Affordable Care Act, immigration and trade pacts.

“And I’ll be darned if they didn’t turn around and do nothing about Obamacare and immigration, give him the trade deal — in fact, pushed the trade deal, and give him the hammer to beat up freedom-loving, security-conscious Republicans and enter into a deadly deal with Iran,” he said.

Huckabee saw Bevin at a rally Tuesday in support of a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple.

“I went up to him and apologized,” Huckabee said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “I said, ‘You know what, I’m embarrassed and I’m sorry that I did it’ … So I apologized to his face yesterday and said, ‘I should have been with you.’”

Huckabee also reiterated his support for Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County who refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. She went to jail for several days after U.S. District Judge David Bunning held her in contempt.

Huckabee, who said he would go to prison in Davis’s place if she has to return, called her incarceration a “watershed moment” in American history, more akin to a dictatorship than the United States.

“She did not only what was legal but what was in her heart,” he said, adding that Davis should not be bound by a “very divided and, frankly, illegal opinion.”

“I stand alone out there on this idea that you don’t surrender to judicial tyranny,” said Huckabee.

Huckabee said the Supreme Court cannot make law. He said Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams all warned against allowing the judicial branch to become too powerful.

“I stand alone out there on this idea that you don’t surrender to judicial tyranny,” he said.

Huckabee pointed to a 19th century Supreme Court decision that rejected a slave’s attempt to sue for his freedom.

“Would we and should we have abided by the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that said black people weren’t fully human? It was quote ‘the law of the land,’ according to these people. Thank God Abraham Lincoln ignored it.”

On the Iran deal, which lifts sanctions and unfreezes assets in foreign bank accounts in exchange for a pledge not to develop nuclear weapons, Huckabee criticized Republican-backed legislation that allowed the deal to be presented not as a treaty but an agreement that had to be rejected. It means that rather than Obama needing a two-thirds affirmative vote in the Senate, the burden is on opponents to come up with a veto-proof majority.

“This is outrageous, and I don’t know why Republicans voted for it,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee said he has been speaking up for the working class and against mass immigration and unfair trade deals for years before GOP front-runner Donald Trump even was thinking about seeking the presidency.

Too many Republican politicians have sold out those voters, Huckabee said.

“Maybe they’re marching to the beat of the donor class, which I think they are,” he said, adding that the working class is getting “ripped off.”