On Newsmax TV’s MidPoint, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum spoke to Ed Berliner about how the Republicans should respond to Barack Obama’s speech about immigration reform.

The president, “who had recently been seen as being backed into a corner, has turned the tables on his challengers,” Berliner began. “Now, everyone is waiting to see how smart the right will be in answering his challenge.”

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“Senator,” he continued, “is it not fair to say that the GOP has to be more cautious than ever before because, in effect, the president has called their bluff and, in many ways, he has backed Republicans into a corner?”

“Well,” Santorum replied, “he’s acted like a child. He’s acted against the Constitution, and he’s thrown Republicans — he’s thrown the country — a curve ball. So, yes, it’s a difficult time, when people in both parties need to take a step back.”

“If you’re a senator or a congressman and a Democrat right now, you’ve just seen the President of the United States basically tell you that you’re irrelevant,” he said. Then, he claimed that Obama said, “‘I don’t need you to change the laws of this country. I can do what I want to do, irrespective of what you say or want.'”

“He’s backing Americans into a corner, of a president who thinks he’s above the law and the above the Constitution. The president doesn’t seem to be at all chastened by the overwhelming opposition to what he’s doing and how he’s doing it.”

Berliner then asked, “is it fair to say that one of the most incorrect things to say is ‘President Reagan did it,’ ‘President Bush did it’? Because if you take the time to look, the comparisons would seem to be to the intellectual — or to common sense — to be completely wrong.”

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“It’s just a farce,” Santorum replied. “What Presidents Reagan and Bush did — that was a very small group of people, and they acted pursuant to a congressional act.”

“That’s not what’s going on here. The president’s saying, ‘You won’t act, so I will.’ That is not what Reagan did. That is not what Bush did.”

“How do the Republicans now fight this,” Berliner asked, “without seeming like racists?”

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By way of answering, Santorum replied with a rhetorical question, asking, “You know who gets hurt the most by this? Hispanics in America. Lower-income workers in America. You’re adding 5 million mostly unskilled workers into a labor pool where wages are declining, when median income in America is declining. And we’re adding 5 million more people, in addition to the 1.1 million legal immigrants, and the illegals — because the president has opened a path to citizenship for whoever gets into this country.”

“We’re going to flood the labor market,” he concluded, “and we’re going to hurt Hispanics, we’re going to blacks and lower-income whites, and he does this out of compassion? He’s doing this as a slap-in-the-face to every working American.”

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Watch the entire interview via YouTube below.