Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the panel discussed President Donald Trump’s senior advisor for policy Stephen Miller getting into a heated exchange with Jim Acosta, the senior White House correspondent for CNN Wednesday at the White House press briefing.

Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney said, “It was a very spirited debate between two very spirited ideologues on the issue of immigration and one of those spirited ideologues on the issue of immigration and one of those very spirited ideologues happened to be a supposedly objective news reporter for CNN Jim Acosta. I thought both of them were too rude and too personal, but this is how we got Trump. This is why people hate the press. Acosta is going in and saying there because of Emma Lazarus’ poem it’s un-American to require immigrants to speak English? Forget about how Stephen Miller got personal. The fact is Acosta is putting out an argument few people hold, and Miller is standing up there, knows immigration policy much better than any reporter I know. And so I just thought it was —let me put it this way Stephen Miller could have done better. Acosta could not have done worse.”

Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz said, “Having a reporter yammer at a White House official by quoting Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty as though that’s the basis for policy, something written in 1883, we’re living in 2017, and like keeping going, that was part of it, it was so obnoxious.”

Scarborough said, “Where things seemed to really melt down was when Jim Acosta — we’re certainly not putting this on Jim Acosta you can watch the clip and choose sides. Maybe we shouldn’t have TV’s in the press room after all. But when Jim Acosta used the language like it seems like your polices are trying to engineer racial and ethnic percentages or something it sure sounded like something that you would read out of Mein Kampf or something. Talking about how it looks like you are engaged in racial engineering or ethnic engineering or something we would have accused the Serbs of doing in the 1990s, at that point, it went off the rails.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN