Mike Huckabee on the Issues

Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and preacher who has announced his run for the presidency on Tuesday, has been outspoken on a range of matters, particularly foreign policy and social issues like same-sex marriage. Here are his stances on important issues.

Foreign Policy

Mr. Huckabee warns that radical Islam is a grave threat to the United States and says President Obama too frequently defends Islam. He supports forceful military action against the Islamic State.

A strong defender of Israel, he has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama’s treatment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and said a proposed nuclear deal with Iran is “terrible” because Iran cannot be trusted. Mr. Huckabee has talked of the possibility of using military force against Iran.

As governor of Arkansas in 2002, he called for lifting the economic embargo of Cuba, which would have helped rice farmers in his state. But he now opposes Mr. Obama’s warming of relations with Havana, calling Cuba’s government tyrannical.

Environment

In 2007 Mr. Huckabee was quoted as saying, “Climate change is here, it’s real.” But more recently he has minimized it as a threat, and said he opposes “cap and trade” legislation meant to curtail carbon emissions. “This kind of mandatory energy policy would have a horrible impact on this nation’s job market,” he said.

Same-Sex Marriage

Mr. Huckabee opposes same-sex marriage, suggesting as recently as February that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice akin to drinking or swearing.

Immigration

Mr. Huckabee said Mr. Obama exceeded his authority by issuing executive actions shielding millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. But Mr. Huckabee said the immigrant children whose parents brought them into the country illegally should not be deported because “you don’t punish a child for something his parents did.”

Economy

Mr. Huckabee has focused his economic message on what he calls wage stagnation under Mr. Obama. But the former governor has opposed calls for a higher minimum wage, calling it government intrusion, and he has suggested that policies that encourage a dependency on federal benefits have helped hold wages down.


Unlike other Republican candidates, Mr. Huckabee is a strong defender of entitlement programs, opposing plans to raise the retirement age for collecting Social Security and criticizing plans to curtail Medicare. Republicans who back such changes, he said, “are embracing a government that lied to its people — that took money from its people under one pretense and then took it away at the time when they started wanting to actually get what they have paid for all these years.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/us/politics/mike-huckabee-on-the-issues.html