A Republican lawmaker in Idaho is defending her comparison of President Barack Obama’s health care reform law to the Holocaust because private insurance companies were like “the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps” and that the federal governor would eventually “pull the trigger” to destroy them.

In an email sent to supporters and messages posted on Twitter last week, state Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll warned that a health care exchange proposed by Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter (R) was “replacing capitalism with socialism.”

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“The insurance companies are creating their own tombs,” Nuxoll wrote in the letter obtained by The Spokesman-Review. “Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange.”

“Several years from now, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies,” she warned. “The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will pull the trigger on the insurance companies.”

On Wednesday, Nuxoll told The Spokesman-Review that she just wanted “people to hear the truth and to be aware that what is being presented before us is a socialistic program… There is no disrespect for any group or people with the analogy.”

“I felt badly for the Jews – it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests,” she said to explain her comparison. “My thing was they didn’t know what was going on. The insurance companies are not realizing what’s going to end up in their demise.”

The Idaho Senate Commerce and Human Resources Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved legislation to create the health insurance exchange.

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After Obama was re-elected on last year, Nuxoll suggested in a tweet that Republicans should stage an electoral college boycott to deny him a second term.

Constitutional scholar David Adler told the Idaho Statesmen that the idea that Obama could technically be denied re-election if the 17 states that voted for Mitt Romney boycotted the electoral college was a “really a strange and bizarre fantasy.”

Adler said that the whole idea was bogus because it was “a radical, revolutionary proposal that has no basis in federal law or the architecture of the Constitution.”

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[Photo: Facebook]

(h/t: Think Progress)