gohmert bak 622

gohmert622

is this bak of main only?

see gohment v pence lawsuit

ariz elector indict 4 24

All 11 Arizona Republican electors, KELLI WARD (001), TYLER BOWYER (002), NANCY COTTLE (003), JACOB HOFFMAN (004), ANTHONY KERN (005), JAMES LAMON (006), ROBERT MONTGOMERY (007), SAMUEL MOORHEAD (008), LORRAINE PELLEGRINO (009), GREGORY SAFSTEN (010), and MICHAEL WARD (011), joined then-Texas Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert in suing Pence on December 27, 2020. Their complaint alleged that "Gohmert will object to the counting of Arizona electors voting for Biden, as well as to the Biden electors from the remaining Contested States." The plaintiffs attempted to have the court declare that Pence could "exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State." KELLI WARD (001) explained the purpose of the suit on twitter:

NOTE HIS COS CLArence clerk, Bunch of az FAKE ELECTORS:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20A115/165483/20210106111314445_Gohmert%20v%20Pence%20Stay%20Appl%20signed.pdf

LOUIE GOHMERT,TYLER BOWYER, NANCY COTTLE, JAKE HOFFMAN, ANTHONY KERN,JAMES R. LAMON, SAM MOORHEAD, ROBERT MONTGOMERY, LORAINE PELLEGRINO, GREG SAFSTEN, KELLI WARDAND MICHAEL WARD,

Applicants, v. THE HONORABLE MICHAEL R. PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY. Respondent.

EMERGENCY APPLICATION TO THE HONORABLE SAMUEL A. ALITO AS CIRCUIT JUSTICE FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT FOR ADMINISTRATIVE STAY AND INTERIM RELIEF PENDING RESOLUTION OF A TIMELY FILED PETITION FOR A

WRIT OF CERTIORARI

William L. Sessions Texas Bar No. 18041500 SESSIONS & ASSOCIATES, PLLC 14591 North Dallas Parkway, Suite 400 Dallas, TX 75254 Tel: (214) 217-8855 Fax: (214) 723-5346 Email: lsessions@sessionslaw.net Lawrence J. Joseph DC Bar #464777

LAW OFFICE OF LAWRENCE J. JOSEPH 1250 Connecticut Av NW, Ste 700 Washington, DC 20036 Tel: (202) 355-9452 Fax: (202) 318-2254 Email: ljoseph@larryjoseph.com Counsel for Applicants Sidney Powell* Texas Bar No. 16209700

SIDNEY POWELL, P.C. 2911 Turtle Creek Blvd., Suite 1100 Dallas, TX 72519 Tel: (214) 628-9514 Fax: (214) 628-9505 Email: sidney@federalappeals.com Howard Kleinhendler NY Bar No. 2657120

HOWARD KLEINHENDLER ESQUIRE 369 Lexington Ave., 12th Floor New York, New York 10017 Tel: (917) 793-1188 Fax: (732) 901-0832 Email: howard@kleinhendler.com * Counsel of Record

dad fbi director

William Sessions was the American attorney of Semion Mogilevich, the "boss of bosses" of the Russian mafia, and a member of the FBI Most Wanted Fugitives list, with close ties to Vladimir Putin.^[17][18][19]

Sessions served as an independent director on several multinational corporations' Boards of Directors in the late 1990s. Judge Sessions later joined the Holland & Knight LLP law firm as of-counsel partner in their Washington DC office.

Sessions married Alice Lewis, his high school classmate, in 1952. Together, they had four children: William L., Pete, Mark, and Sara. He filed for divorce on February 20, 2018, but this was dismissed without prejudice on October 11, 2019.^[10] Alice died in 2019 at their home in Washington, D.C.^[26]

j6 ch 5

President Trump’s Allies Filed Lawsuits Seeking a Court Order Directing Vice President Pence Not to Count Certain Electoral Votes.

One of President Trump’s congressional allies, Representative Louie Gohmert (R–TX), pushed a version of Eastman’s theory in the courts. On December 27, 2020, Representative Gohmert and several of the Trump Campaign’s fake electors for the State of Arizona (including Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward) filed suit against Vice President Pence in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.67 As Ward explained to Marc Short in a phone call the day the suit was filed, President Trump was aware of the lawsuit and had signed off on it: “We wouldn’t have done that without the president telling us it was okay,” she told him.68

In the suit, the Plaintiffs alleged that there were “competing slates” of electors from five States.69 They asked the court to rule that portions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were unconstitutional and that “the Twelfth Amendment contains the exclusive dispute resolution mechanisms” for determining an objection raised by a Member of Congress to the electors submitted by any State.70 Essentially, Representative Gohmert was asking the court to tell Vice President Pence that he was prohibited from following the procedures set forth in the Electoral Count Act. Much like Eastman’s theory, the Gohmert plaintiffs asserted that the Vice President has the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to determine which electoral votes to count.71

Although the Gohmert suit was premised on the same theory Eastman advocated, Eastman did not agree with the decision to file suit. Eastman argued that filing a suit against the Vice President had “close[] to zero” chance of succeeding, and there was a “very high” risk that the court would issue an opinion stating that “Pence has no authority to reject the Biden-certified ballots.” 72 As highlighted by Judge Carter, Eastman’s theory was that Vice President Pence should take this action “without asking for permission” from Congress or the courts.73 Another attorney, Bill Olson, stated that getting a judicial determination “that Pence is constrained by [the Electoral Count Act]” could “completely tank the January 6 strategy.” 74 Those who were advocating to press on with the Eastman scheme did not want to bring it before a Federal judge because of the high risk that a court’s determination that the scheme was illegal would stop the plan to overturn the election dead in its tracks.

Eastman himself pushed this cavalier attitude towards the courts and compliance with the law during a call with Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers on January 4th. During this call, just two days before the joint session, Eastman pressed Speaker Bowers to bring the Arizona House into session to certify Trump electors or decertify the Biden electors.75 Speaker Bowers responded as he had previously responded to similar entreaties by Giuliani and President Trump: by explaining that doing so would require him to violate his oaths to the U.S. and Arizona Constitutions and that he “wasn’t going to take such an action.” 76 Undeterred, Eastman still pushed Speaker Bowers to “just do it and let the courts sort it through.” 77

an 922

A former investigator for the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection recently expressed concern about Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) repeated echoing of former President Donald Trump.

In fact, he believes the lawmakers' support of the former president's "unhinged conspiracy theories" has convinced him that they are both detached from reality and adamant about ignoring facts.

According to Business Insider, former January 6 House committee investigator Denver Riggleman laid out his arguments in his new book, "The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th."

He also expressed concern about the lawmakers' mental health. "I came to believe Gosar and Gohmert may have had serious cognitive issues," Riggleman wrote in his book.

Riggleman's criticism, per Insider, is a result of "absorbing all the wild ideas the conservative duo would throw around while they huddled with other members of thefar-right House Freedom Caucus."

His remarks, per the news outlet, also coincide with a poll included in its "Red, White, and Gray" project, described as an exploration of "life in a democracy helmed by those of advanced age."

In excerpts of the book referenced by The Guardian, Riggleman wrote that the Republican lawmakers "seemed to be joined at the brain stem when it came to their eagerness to believe wild, dramatic fantasies about Democrats, the media and big tech."

The results of the poll suggest many Americans support the idea of Congressional candidates undergoing medical exams to ensure they are fit for office.

According to the poll, "Eighty-one percent of respondents said they support subjecting congressional candidates to physical and mental exams before they're allowed to serve — an issue that's already on voters' minds as the 2024 presidential race takes shape."

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/16/jan-6-gohmert-lawsuit-pence-524839

no lnx many

INSURRECTION FALLOUT

The Jan. 6 puzzle piece that's going largely ignored

Rep. Louie Gohmert sued then-Vice President Mike Pence on Dec. 27. Donald Trump’s involvement in the case remains unclear.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), who is now running for Texas attorney general, has said little about his lawsuit. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

By KYLE CHENEY

12/16/2021

As Donald Trump and his allies squeezed then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Joe Biden’s presidency in the weeks ahead of Jan. 6, they used one particular tool that’s been largely ignored ever since.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) sued Pence on Dec. 27, just as Trump was ratcheting up his pressure campaign against his vice president. Backed by a squad of lawyers associated with Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, Gohmert argued Pence should assert unilateral control over certification, governed only by the vague wording of the Twelfth Amendment.

Gohmert’s move forced Pence to publicly resist Trump’s subversion of the election, only a week before the fateful Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. When the Justice Department stepped in to defend Pence from the lawsuit on Dec. 29, it marked the first time Pence signaled he wouldn’t fold to Trump’s demands.

Pence allies have long believed that Trump played a role in Gohmert’s legal strategy, and they’ve indicated that Trump was frustrated that the Justice Department intervened to defend his vice president against Gohmert’s suit. But what remains unknown is just how involved Trump was in Gohmert’s legal strategy. A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment.

And while it’s unclear whether the Jan. 6 select panel is probing the genesis of Gohmert’s suit — which was quickly rejected by federal district and appellate courts in Texas — one committee member described it as an important episode in the runup to the violence at the Capitol.

“It’s a significant detail in that it was part of a plan to isolate and coerce Pence,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

A litany of new details about Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence have emerged in recent weeks. Those include memos from Trump attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis that lay out fringe legal rationales for halting certification, as well as proof of further public and private force exerted by Trump himself. Gohmert’s suit is rarely mentioned in the publicly available pre-Jan. 6 timetable.

Gohmert’s goal, outlined in the suit, was to force Pence to ignore the 130-year-old law that governs the final certification of presidential elections and instead wield total authority over the proceedings. Pence ultimately decided that he lacked this power and his role was almost entirely ceremonial. He revealed his final decision on Jan. 6, shortly before a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol amid chants that he was a “traitor” and should be hanged.

As for why Gohmert led the suit, Powell has publicly indicated that one reason was because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has jurisdiction over his home state of Texas. Alito, Powell argued, might have bought more time for pro-Trump forces to reverse the results by blocking Pence from certifying Biden’s victory. (There’s no evidence Alito was considering this).

Dinners with friends

The Thomases have kept in contact with Hair for years, according to several photos and messages shared on Facebook by Hair and others and obtained by CNN.

In 2016, Hair posted about attending a Colbie Caillat concert, sending her thanks for a "fun" evening to Ginni Thomas. Hair posed for photos with Clarence Thomas and at dinner with him, his wife and others the night of the concert, according to Facebook posts.

Hair has worked in Gohmert's office since 2010, according to congressional staffing records.

In 2017, she took a new round of pictures with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, this time inside the justice's chambers. That day, January 20, 2017, Clarence Thomas had sworn in Pence as vice president. In her Facebook post, Hair calls the Thomases "great friends."

And in 2019, Hair took part in a meeting at the White House with Trump and Ginni Thomas to discuss hiring more Trump loyalists in his administration, according to a senior Trump administration official.

Over the past decade, Ginni Thomas and Hair's photos together and posts tagging each other are numerous.

Then after the 2020 election and January 6 Capitol riot, Hair on her Facebook wall shared coverage of Clarence Thomas dissenting on a Supreme Court election case, writing, "GOD BLESS HIM." The case was a too-late attemptby Pennsylvania Republicans to challenge the state's use of mail-in ballots, and Thomas expressed a fearthat mail-in balloting could allow for fraud in future elections.

And in text messages to Meadows, which CNN obtained last month, Ginni Thomas quotes Hair in November 2020 as she implores the Trump White House to stick with its claims of election fraud.

"This war is psychological. PSYOP. It's what I did in the military. They are using every weapon they have to try to make us quit... It is fake, fraud and if people would take a deep breath and look at things through that filter we will see this through and win," Ginni Thomas texted Meadows on November 14, 2020.

She then cites Hair's name in the text, implying the words came from her friend. The source familiar with the Thomases said Ginni Thomas was cutting and pasting Hair's own words from another text chain, to send to Meadows.

Gohmert headed to SCOTUS

Soon after these texts, Gohmert's office took part in two cases that challenged the election result at the Supreme Court.

First, Texas' attorney general went straight to the high court to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin -- all swing states Joe Biden had won -- claiming they had conducted their elections unconstitutionally.

The case theoretically could have given the Supreme Court the power to throw out the presidential election result. Gohmert was one of 126 Republican members of Congress to sign on to an amicus brief supporting Texas before the high court.

On December 11, just days after the case had been filed, a majority of justices rejected the attempt, saying Texas had not shown it had the legal right to challenge how another state conducts its election.

Clarence Thomas signed on to a two-sentence statement, penned by Justice Samuel Alito, arguing a procedural point that the court should not have dismissed the case outright because it fell under the court's "original jurisdiction." But importantly, Thomas and Alito did note that they would grant no other relief to Texas in the case.

A source close to Thomas believes that the justice's position on that case and others shows he was not swayed by his wife's interests.

Even with that swift loss at the Supreme Court, Gohmert's office wasn't finished aiming election challenges at the high court.

In late December, Gohmert tried with a case of his own. The congressman sued Pence directly. The lawsuit asked the court to force Pence to stop the Electoral College certification of Biden's win.

That prompted Pence's lawyers to speak up in court, asking a federal judge to dismiss Gohmert's case. It was a crucial early moment of the vice president publicly defending his role of presiding over the Senate. Pence has stood by his position that the vice president couldn't overturn the election and courts should not have either.

TheGohmert case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court on January 6, the day of the Electoral College certification.

"Our nation stands at the crossroads of a Constitutional crisis fraught by chaos and turmoil brought into play by a viral plague, anti-democratic interference from domestic and foreign sources, and hastily enacted State voting measures ostensibly placed to protect voters from catching the plague," Gohmert's filing said.

The court denied its request the next day, with no dissents noted.

CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen and Gabby Orr contributed to this report.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/

theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwell and Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.”It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair, whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the first Blackwell-Klukowski collaboration. They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council

perry denied, then proved? 3 more denied?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/5-takeaways-jan-6-hearing-trumps-doj-plot/

wapo

June 23, 2022

In the Jan. 6 committee hearing on June 23, witnesses described how President Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to investigate election fraud. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

The plot was spearheaded within the department by an official named Jeffrey Clark, whose home federal agents searched Wednesday in a significant development that reflects the increasing legal jeopardy faced by Trump’s allies and perhaps Trump himself. Trump at one point considered installing Clark as acting attorney general to further the plot — which prompted mass resignation threats....

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

Timeline: Trump's pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the election

Below, some takeaways from the hearing.

The pardon picture, filled out

In a video presented on June 23, Trump White House officials said that at least five House Republicans asked President Donald Trump for pardons. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The committee has repeatedly previewed evidence that certain key players in Trump’s plot soughtpardons. Last week, one of them was revealed to be Trump lawyer John Eastman, who asked to be put on “the pardon list.” The implication from that email was that there was indeed a list that seemingly might have other names.

The committee built out its own list Thursday, adding several House Republicans to it. Here are the names and the evidence:

Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — In a Jan. 11 email from Brooks, he said he and Gaetz were suggesting pardons for everyone who objected to the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also said he believed that Gaetz had requested a pardon. White House aide John McEntee said Gaetz told him he asked for one from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, also testified to the effort by Brooks and Gaetz, saying that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon “since early December” and that he reached out to her personally.

Days after the Capitol attack and the final attempt to overturn the election, Members of Congress requested pardons.

Five days after the attack on the Capitol, Representative Mo Brooks requested pardons for himself, Representative Gaetz, and others. pic.twitter.com/f0xLm5SKtT

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 23, 2022

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — Hutchinson said that she had heard that Greene had asked the White House counsel’s office for a pardon from deputy counsel Pat Philbin but that Greene hadn’t asked her personally.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Perry has flatly denied seeking a pardon, calling it “a shameless, soulless lie,” but Hutchinson said he talked to her directly about it.

Hutchinson also said that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whom House Republicans tried to put on the committee before Democrats objected, talked with the White House about congressional pardons but that she was unaware of him asking for one.

What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means

Asking for a pardon doesn’t equal admitting guilt,[but in applying you must tell what you did? negates exec priv] and Eastman in particular argued that his request was meant as a precaution. But given how far-fetched this plot was and how often those involved were told their plot was illegal, that fact that people were trying to cover their backsides on the way out is important.

And crucially, some of these requests came even before the plot failed on Jan. 6.

an 6 22

after Thursday’s revelation thatGinni Thomas, the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and a far right-wing activist in her own right, had been emailing with the author of the Trump “coup memo,” attorney John Eastman, legal experts are weighing in, with some suggesting this latest news changes the legal landscape of the case.

“Forget her marriage,” says former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, now an LA Times legal affairs columnist.

Litman, who also teaches constitutional law, says the “correspondence between her and John Eastman” makes her look “more and more like a full-fledged potential co-conspirator of her own accord.”

[twt]

Thomas reportedly pressured White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to have the election overturned, pressured 29 GOP state lawmakers to submit pro-Trump electors to Congress to disenfranchise millions of Arizona voters, emailed with John Eastman, attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse on January 6 and was reportedly seen at the Willard Hotel on January 6 where the Trump “command center” for the mission to overthrow the election, led by Rudy Giuliani, was headquartered. She is also friends with the chief of staff of GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert, who sued to try to force Pence to throw the election to Trump, and is a member of the private “Thomas Clerk World” email listserv, comprised of past and present law clerks of her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, and supports the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

“If there is anything close to equal justice under law, she will not be held immune from the consequences, including prosecution,” says Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, contributing editor for The Atlantic, and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Joyce Vance, also a former U.S. Attorney, now an MSNBC/NBC News legal analyst and law professor notes that John Eastman “clerked for” Justice Clarence Thomas. “It’s always seemed entirely too coincidental that they were both pushing the fake slates of state electors plan.”

Veteran journalist Dan Rather: rotton onion layers

main zombied koch 2?

lcv 5-11 % http://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/louie-gohmert

SEE TWO field error?

wow, how possible in debt? http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/

html “justification” bak capt 622

mofo, evil or villain pending, stoopid long confirmed

Louis B. Gohmert Jr (R-Texas) ranks 436th in the House with an estimated net worth* of $-162,501 in 2012.

an 6 22

after Thursday’s revelation that Ginni Thomas, the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and a far right-wing activist in her own right, had been emailing with the author of the Trump “coup memo,” attorney John Eastman, legal experts are weighing in, with some suggesting this latest news changes the legal landscape of the case.

“Forget her marriage,” says former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, now an LA Times legal affairs columnist.

Litman, who also teaches constitutional law, says the “correspondence between her and John Eastman” makes her look “more and more like a full-fledged potential co-conspirator of her own accord.”

[twt]

Thomas reportedly pressured White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to have the election overturned, pressured 29 GOP state lawmakers to submit pro-Trump electors to Congress to disenfranchise millions of Arizona voters, emailed with John Eastman, attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse on January 6 and was reportedly seen at the Willard Hotel on January 6 where the Trump “command center” for the mission to overthrow the election, led by Rudy Giuliani, was headquartered. She is also friends with the chief of staff of GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert, who sued to try to force Pence to throw the election to Trump, and is a member of the private “Thomas Clerk World” email listserv, comprised of past and present law clerks of her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, and supports the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

Veteran journalist Dan Rather: rotton onion layers

12 21 am fest krk troll caucus?

sued VP big lie = coup?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/louie-gohmert/

621 chris hayes ID's False Flag as inevitable final stage of conspir BS, floated by tucker?

OP Congressman: FBI 'participated' in insurrection to 'entrap' harmless protestors and 'frame the MAGA movement'

David Badash June 18, 2021

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is demanding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dept. of Justice tell Congress what they know about their own alleged "participation" in Donald Trump's January 6 ...

stop the steal clown car elite strike team:

...After Giuliani's segment ended, Powell took the lectern and alleged without evidence that an international Communist plot had been engineered by Venezuela, Cuba, China, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation, to rig the 2020 election.[9][43] She also alleged that Dominion Voting Systems "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden."[44]

The source for many of these claims appeared to be far right news organization One America News Network (OANN).[9] She also repeated a conspiracy theory[45] spread by Congressman Louis Gohmert, OANN and others:[46] that accurate voting results had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish electronic voting firm Scytl, where they were tabulated to reveal a landslide victory for Trump, after which a company server was supposedly seized in a raid by the United States Army.[9] The US Army and Scytl refuted these claims:[47] Scytl has not had any offices in Germany since September 2019, and they do not tabulate US votes.[48][49]

Later that evening on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he had invited Powell onto the show to provide proof of her allegations. According to Carlson, after repeated requests, Powell became angry and said to "stop contacting her". Carlson's team contacted other figures in the Trump campaign, who said that Powell had given them no evidence for her allegations.[50]...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/house-adopts-resolution-calling-for-a-peaceful-transfer-of-presidential-power-except-for-5-republicans

claiming that Democrats are trying to use mail-in voting to promote voter fraud, President Donald Trump has refused to say that he will accept the election results if former Vice President Joe Biden wins in November. The U.S. House of Representatives, in response, adopted a resolution on Tuesday calling for a peaceful transfer of power in the presidential election — and it passed 379-5. Most House Republicans voted in favor of the resolution, but five didn't: Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

Gaetz, according to Axios reporter Rebecca Falconer, views the resolution as a Democratic attack on Trump even though many Republicans voted for it. Falconer quotes the Florida congressman as saying: "This resolution is a way for Democrats to attack the president and disguise the fact that they will refuse to accept the election results unless they win. Professional loser Hillary Clinton has told Joe Biden that he should not concede — and I'm quoting — 'under any circumstances.'"

Gaetz is taking Clinton's words out of context. During an August interview with Jennifer Palmieri for Showtime, Clinton stressed that under no circumstances should Biden, in a close election, concede until he is certain that all of the votes have been counted. Clinton fears that Trump will prematurely claim victory on Election Night before all of the votes have been counted in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona.

Clinton, during that interview, said, "Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don't give an inch — and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is." But Clinton wasn't saying that Biden should never concede under any circumstances, only that under no circumstances should he concede until there has been a thorough vote count. And Clinton is confident that a thorough vote count will eventually favor Biden, who unlike Trump, has said that he would concede if a final vote count showed a Trump victory.

During that interview, Clinton also said, "We've got to have a massive legal operation; I know the Biden campaign is working on that. We have to have poll workers, and I urge people who are able to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they're going to do."

--===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/louie-gohmert-is-a-dangerous-fool-just-like-the-president-he-so-admires/

no lnx

Michael Winship / Common Dreams August 2, 2020

A few years ago, while I was president of the Writers Guild of America, East, several union members and I went down to Washington to hold a midday briefing on Capitol Hill about net neutrality.

We were in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Rayburn office building. To lure an audience, on a table at the back, we provided a pile of free paper bag lunches for the small crowd. As usual with this sort of event, most of the people who showed up were hungry young congressional staffers but at one point, a colleague poked me in the ribs, pointed and said, “Look—an actual congressman is grabbing a couple of our lunches!”

“Doesn’t count,” I replied. “It’s Louie Gohmert.”

Yes, Louie Gohmert, the man the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt described just this week as “America’s dumbest and craziest congressman.” The man who claimed the Obama White House had been infiltrated by “many Muslim Brotherhood members” and once tried to nominate as Speaker of the House a man who had just been beaten for reelection. The man who once declared that same-sex marriage caused Noah’s flood and that Charlottesville was a “false flag” operation, with people posing as KKK and Black Lives Matter protesters bused in to make trouble. The man who outed the alleged whistleblower during the impeachment proceedings and voted against a Federal anti-lynching law. And on and on…

In the latest chapter of the ongoing saga of East Texas US Rep. Gohmert holding onto his title as the biggest blockhead in Congress (admittedly, there are a lot of contenders), it was revealed that Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19 after weeks of walking around the capitol and congressional offices without a mask. His condition was caught when he was prescreened by the White House as he was getting ready to fly to West Texas with Donald Trump on Air Force One. Who knows how long he’d been walking the halls and corridors spreading contagion along with his own innate cheer and charm?

Previously, he had claimed that he didn’t needed to wear a mask because he was being tested on a regular basis. The day before his diagnosis was announced, he was sitting maskless at the House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr and at one point was seen leaving a nearby men’s room with Barr. There was minimal social distancing and Barr wasn’t wearing a mask, either.

Upon receiving word of Gohmert’s positive test, the following occurred:

Rather than call and immediately self-quarantine, he went to his office to personally inform the staff of his status. It’s uncertain as to whether he was wearing a mask.

A Gohmert aide tweeted Jake Sherman at Politico, “When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely.’ When probing the office, you might want to ask how often people were berated for wearing masks.” Gohmert denied the beratement accusation.

Subsequently, Sherman tweeted, “Ive gotten a flood of emails from republican staffers who say they too are being forced to come to the hill without a mask now.” (sic)

In a video, Gohmert idiotically argued that wearing a mask – assuming he ever was wearing one — might have made him sick. “I can’t help but wonder if by keeping a mask on,” he said, “keeping it in place — if I might’ve got some germ, some of the virus, on the mask and breathed it in.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy accidentally referred to Gohmert as “Congressman COVID.”

As per The Washington Post, on Wednesday night, Gohmert “told Fox News host Sean Hannity he and his doctor already had agreed on a treatment: hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug pushed by President Trump and his allies despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and medical experts that it isn’t effective as a coronavirus treatment and could carry significant health risks. ‘My doctor and I are all in.'”

This all would be funny in a sardonic, blackly humorous sort of way if not for the fact that Gohmert consistently has spread misinformation about the virus, and hails from a state where the governor and other elected Republican officials were in denial about COVID, reopened too early and as of this writing have 436,402 confirmed coronavirus cases and 7,107 deaths.

And then there’s this: last Sunday, competing demonstrations were held at a public square in downtown Tyler, Texas, part of Gohmert’s district. One was a pro-police protest—with MAGA hats, Trump 2020 signs and tee shirts and at least one Confederate flag—the other a smaller counterprotest in support of Gohmert’s Democratic opponent for the House and against the presence of anonymous Federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon.

Earlier in the week, Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce gave a heads up as to what happened next. Here’s part of an account, as reported by a local news site, The Gilmer Mirror:

Armed supporters of Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Tyler) brutally beat and assaulted Ryan Miller, the campaign manager for Gohmert’s opponent, Hank Gilbert (D-Tyler) around 2:30 PM CST Sunday during a peaceful rally organized to protest the unconstitutional occupation of Portland, Oregon on the courthouse square in downtown Tyler.

Miller was attacked by at least four protesters, some of whom were armed, and sustained blows to the head and other parts of his body, as well as a large gash under his eye. The incident occurred as officers from the Tyler Police Department drove around the square idly, waving at the Blue Lives Matter counter-protesters who had come to support Gilbert’s opponent.

Gohmert’s supporters disrupted the rally by shouting, ‘Louie! Louie! Louie!’ repeatedly, including while Miller was being brutally attacked.

A police report has been filed with Tyler police, who showed up on the square after the violence was well-underway.

Tyler police say their investigation is ongoing. But when Louie Gohmert was asked about the incident, he refused to condemn the attack and characteristically, turned the situation on its head. He responded (in part), “[W]hat came to my mind is the violence Democrat leaders paid to create at Trump campaign events in 2016, followed by Democrats then claiming Donald Trump incited violence. They created the mess, then blamed candidate Trump. There are Democrats and Marxists doing the same thing this year, as well.

… It is unfortunate that extremists wanted to bring the violent protests and riots we’ve seen around the country to our peaceable area here in East Texas. …The goal of the Marxist groups is to destroy this great nation through violence and intimidation, which calls into question why anyone of sound mind would want to support and replicate these violent activities in Tyler. That comes from either terrible judgment or an intent to use Bolshevik or Mao tactics.

Contrast that inflammatory lying nonsense and all his other bloviating rhetoric with the final words left us on Thursday by another congressman, the late John Lewis, laid to rest in Atlanta with bouquets of righteous eloquence from friends and colleagues, among them House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama.

“Democracy is not a state,” Rep. Lewis wrote in his farewell. “It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself… In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”

We can make fun of Louie Gohmert; he’s an easy target. But for all the buffoonery, he’s a very dangerous fellow, an enabler of Donald Trump and the forces that seek to undermine and destroy everything that John Lewis and the speakers at his funeral represent, especially true freedom and patriotism, unity and equal justice under the law.

You can go ahead and laugh at Louie Gohmert but remember, he represents the views of far too many of our fellow Americans—and he’s probably heading for re-election to his eighth term in the House.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-administration-insisted-this-democratic-congressman-hold-hearings-in-person-now-he-has-19

no lnx

Days after being forced to share air with a Texas congressman (and staunch anti-mask enthusiast)—who tested positive for COVID-19 the very next day—Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva announced Saturday that he, too, has tested positive for the deadly virus.

WASHINGTON— Today, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva issued the following statement after testing positive for COVID-19:

“The Attending Physician of the Capitol informed me that I tested positive for COVID-19. As a result, I will be self-isolating in quarantine at his recommendation. I currently have no symptoms, feel fine, and hope to make a quick and speedy recovery.

“While I cannot blame anyone directly for this, this week has shown that there are some Members of Congress who fail to take this crisis seriously. Numerous Republican members routinely strut around the Capitol without a mask to selfishly make a political statement at the expense of their colleagues, staff, and their families. I’m pleased that Speaker Pelosi has mandated the use of masks at the Capitol to keep members and staff safe from those looking to score quick political points. Stopping the spread of a deadly virus should not be a partisan issue.

“I urge all of us to recognize the severity of this virus and follow the CDC guidance to keep our family, friends, and loved ones safe. We can all play a part in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in our communities.”

Unlike those working for Rep. Louie Gohmert, the aforementioned Texas congressman, the majority of Rep. Grijalva’s staff has been working remotely for months; thus, also unlike with Rep. Gohmert, no “in-person” reveal party of his COVID-19 test results was required. However, as The Washington Post’s Radley Balko points out, the hearing that brought the congressman (and others) together also wasn’t required.

“This is infuriating,” Balko tweeted in a thread on Saturday. “Grijalva chairs the committee investigating the clearing of Lafayette Square. He wanted his hearing to be via video. The Trump administration said it wouldn’t cooperate unless Grijalva flew from Arizona to D.C. to appear in person.”

“Given his comorbidities,” Balko continued, “Grijalva and his staff told me they saw this as a childish taunt—a dare. He agreed anyway, because he thought investigating what happened is important.”

gohmert kept of AF1 b/c of fever, tested pos, said he got it FROM mask; next day Cain dies.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/reporter-inundated-with-flood-of-e-mails-from-gop-staffers-who-were-forced-to-work-without-face-masks/

https://www.mediamatters.org/jeanine-pirro/fox-prohibits-participation-campaign-events-jeanine-pirro-doing-texas-fundraiser-rep

AN 420

fact checker busts GOP Rep. Gohmert for hyping nonexistent ‘mist’ that purportedly kills COVID-19 instantly

stupid mfer, took himself out of quar post cpac?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rep-louie-gohmert-is-single-handedly-holding-up-house-coronavirus-bill-before-it-can-be-sent-to-senate/

no lnx

Rep. Louie Gohmert is single-handedly holding up House coronavirus bill before it can be sent to Senate

Written by David Edwards / Raw Story March 16, 2020

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday reportedly blocked “technical corrections” to a House coronavirus relief bill that was scheduled to be sent to the Senate.

Gohmert told Bloomberg’s Laura Litvan that he didn’t know if his concerns could be resolved in time to vote on the technical corrections on Monday.

Read some of the tweets from congressional reporters below.

GOP Rep Louis Gohmert of Texas, who is single-handedly holding up a technical fix needed to the House coronavirus bill, told me he doesn’t know if his concerns can be solved today. He hasn’t seen final text and doesn’t appreciate the rushed process for passing the bill Saturday.

— Laura Litvan (@LauraLitvan) March 16, 2020

“Technical fix” is a dull-sounding name for something that has to happen before the Senate will take up the coronavirus bill. It’s a change that Republicans want to see related to virus-related paid leave for employees of small businesses.

— Laura Litvan (@LauraLitvan) March 16, 2020

NEW — LOUIE GOHMERT is insisting on reading the technical corrections to the House’s coronavirus bill.

As long as one person stands in opposition, the House cannot send the bill to the senate without bringing the chamber back for a vote.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 16, 2020

REPUBLICAN and DEMOCRATIC leadership have been made aware of Gohmert’s concerns.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 16, 2020

House can’t send coronavirus relief bill to Senate as things stand. Rep. Louie Gohmert has insisted on reading the technical corrections, and as long as one member opposes, bill can’t move unless chamber reconvenes and votes.

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) March 16, 2020

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is opposing House unanimous consent passage of technical changes to House economic relief bill at least until he’s read it.He was 1 of 40 Republicans to vote No on the bill early Sat morning. House currently stands in recess while this issue is resolved.

— Craig Caplan (@CraigCaplan) March 16, 2020

State of play on house bill:

-“technical correction” not finished yet, per senior d aide (its unclear what that means)

-House was supposed to pass new version by unanimous consent but Rep. Gohmert wants to read new text. Unclear when that will emerge and he will do

— Alana Abramson (@aabramson) March 16, 2020

4) Fox is told Gohmert flew back to Washington to review the legislation. Fox is told there are 46 pages of changes to the 110 page bill. “Somebody should at least go through it,” said one source.

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) March 16, 2020

Unclear if Rep. Gohmert will actually force a vote on changes to the corona relief bill (or is just making a point)

But he can only do so if he’s physically on the House floor to object—theoretically, the bill’s managers could wait for him to leave to call it up

— Sam Brodey (@sambrodey) March 16, 2020

REP. LOUIE GOHMERT (R-Texas) has signaled he will insist on approving the corrections to the bill, or else he will object to the unanimous consent request in the House. That would grind this process to a halt.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 16, 2020

trump eco rules killed tally over 100?

120

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-clean-water-protection-2644896051.html

Today, the Trump administration will finalize its replacement for the Obama-era Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule in a move that will strip protections from more than half of the nation's wetlands and allow landowners to dump pesticides into waterways, or build over wetlands, for the first time in decades.

President Donald Trump has been working to undo the 2015 rule since he took office, but his replacement goes even further, The New York Times explained. In addition to rolling back protections for some wetlands and streams that run intermittently or temporarily underground, it will also get rid of a requirement that landowners seek permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which had considered permits on a case-by-case basis before 2015.

"This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen," Southern Environmental Law Center lawyer Blan Holman told The New York Times. "This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the '70s and '80s that Americans have relied on for their health."

The administration announced the repeal of the WOTUS rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, in September of 2019. That rule had expanded the definition of "waters of the United States" under the 1972 Clean Water Act from larger bodies of water to include streams and wetlands. The rule was controversial before Trump took office.Many farmers and businesses thought it gave the federal government too much power, and court rulings had suspended it in 28 states.

Trump appealed to this logic when he touted his repeal Sunday at the American Farm Bureau Federation Annual Convention and Trade Show in Austin, Texas.

"I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration's disastrous Waters of the United States rule," he said. "Thank you. It's gone. That was a rule that basically took your property away from you."

However, the rule was also based on a review of 1,200 scientific studies that found that streams and wetlands were connected to waters downstream. And legal experts say Trump's replacement goes even further than repealing the 2015 rule to deny decades-old protections to smaller headwaters.

"This is rolling back federal jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act further than it's ever been before," Vermont Law School environmental law professor Patrick Parenteau told The New York Times "Waters that have been protected for almost 50 years will no longer be protected under the Clean Water Act."

The science behind Trump's new rule is already being challenged, including by some of Trump's own appointees.

Late in 2019, the EPA's Scientific Advisory Board, which is staffed with many Trump picks, questioned the science behind three of the administration's deregulatory moves, including its WOTUS repeal. The board wrote that the administration's proposed replacement "neglects established science" by "failing to acknowledge watershed systems," The New York Times reported at the time. The board also said it found "no scientific justification" for denying protections to certain bodies of water.

The board's comments will likely prove useful to environmental groups and the attorneys general of several states, who are expected to sue to block the new rule, The New York Times reported.

"The legal standing all has to do with whether you have a rational basis for what you're doing," Parenteau told The New York Times. "And when you have experts saying you're not adhering to the science, that's not rational, it's arbitrary."

The rule is also already being challenged by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which has called for an investigation into how it was finalized, E&E News reported Monday.

"The writing of the final Rule was controlled solely by [EPA] Headquarters political appointees," the complaint, signed by 44 current and former EPA employees, said. "The final Rule contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus on the connectivity of wetlands and waters, and the impacts that ephemeral streams and so-called 'geographically isolated' wetlands have on downstream navigable waters."

The group filed the complaint with the EPA's Office of Inspector General and asked it to determine if the rule violated the agency's Scientific Integrity Policy.

The final rule is due to be announced in Dallas, Texas today by EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials, as well as Texas Republican Representatives Louie Gohmert and Ron Wright, Courthouse News Service reported.

drinking water trump administration epa clean water act water public health

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/1134751/

outs whistleblower?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trumps-most-fanatical-right-wing-followers-are-going-ballistic-over-impeachment-and-talking-of-civil-war

no lnx twit graf

Trump’s most fanatical right-wing followers are going ballistic over impeachment — and talking of ‘civil war’

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos December 27, 2019

The most fanatical right-wing followers of Donald Trump have been warning for some time that any attempt to impeach the man in the Oval Office would result in a second American civil war that will produce large amounts of bloodshed as they rise up with their weapons caches and begin murdering liberals.

Now that he actually has been impeached, they’re going even more ballistic.

“He’s not gonna be removed. He’s not gonna be removed. He’s not gonna be removed,” one attendee at Trump rally told a CBS reporter. When the reporter asked, “Do you feel confident in that?” he responded, “My .357 Magnum is comfortable with that. End of story.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert—who has talked up civil war on several previous occasions—went ballistic on the floor of the House last week, warning that impeachment meant the end of America: “This is a travesty. We’re in big trouble,” Gohmert huffed, adding, “Now it’s lowered even further, the bar. [Impeachment] will be used for political battles and this country’s end is now in sight. I hope I don’t live to see it. This is an outrage.”

Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins was even more unhinged in his similar rant last week: “They fear the true will of we the people. They are deep established D.C. They fear, they call this Republican map flyover country. They call us deplorables. They fear our faith, they fear our strength, they fear our unity, they fear our vote, and they fear our president. We will never surrender our nation to career establishment D.C. politicians and bureaucrats. Our republic shall survive this threat from within. American patriots shall prevail.”

The real action, however, has been on social media, where Facebook and Twitter posts eagerly anticipating the violent uprising to preserve Trump’s presidency have been as common as dirt.

Ex-Navy SEAL Jonathan Gilliam, for instance, used Gohmert’s comments as a springboard on Twitter for open discussion of a shooting civil war in which conservatives begin killing liberals for attempting to remove Trump: “Like so many, I see exactly what he sees. Therefor [sic] it is time we begin considering the possibility of civil war.”

“I am counting down the days until the vigilantes take to the streets. I dread the inevitable conflict that is coming but will do whatever I can I can to support the fight against the Left,” one commenter replied. Another answered: “lol it would be a short Civil War II. The vast majority of the peace officers, military personnel, and gritty hard-working 2nd Amendment loving Americans are on our side. The snowflakes have no idea about the sleeping bear they are about to awaken.”

[pix ReneHollan.PNG]

A fairly typical response among far-right extremists has been to pledge utter fealty to Trump, even unto death. Rene Hollan, a Monroe, Wash., man who is a regular participant in events organized by Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys in the Pacific Northwest, posted a screed (later removed by Facebook) vowing that he would even detonate a nuclear bomb in a major liberal city:

As a naturalized U.S. citizen who swore the Oath of Allegiance, if President Trump orders me to drive a truck with a nuke into a city with Facebook offices or an illegal sanctuary city, and detonate it, killing myself, everyone in the city, and rendering it a sheet of glass, it would be my honor to comply.

Another Northwest far-right figure, “documentarian” Brandon Farley—long a player in the Portland-area “patriot” scene—invited neo-Nazis to start killing his critics: “Hey Atomwaffen, will you please take note of this and act accordingly?” he tweeted.

Farley3.png

A couple of days later, Farley discovered that his name came up in Twitter searches for Atomwaffen, and expressed his confusion.

Social scientist Caroline Orr collected a large cache of these kinds of comments on Twitter, noting, “It’s easy to laugh at the keyboard warriors in the mix, but there are definitely extremists using this opportunity to try to bring about social and political upheaval by issuing calls for violence.”

“Lock N Load, PATRIOTS, the demonrats just told us what they want for Christmas: #CivilWar2,” wrote one. “Let’s make the demon rats live on the streets of their own districts!”

“ALERT!! If the Democrats impeach OUR PRESIDENT WE NEED TO HAVE A CIVIL WAR,” tweeted another. “America as we have known it will be gone and the squad will be in charge of us. I shiver thinking of it. A civil war will be the only way to get America back as we remember it.”

Of course, it’s always worth remembering that this talking point has been deliberately promoted by Russian intelligence agencies as part of their campaign to undermine American democracy. A Justice Department affidavit released in 2018 noted that the “civil war” meme is being directly encouraged by Internet Research Agency, the Russian-financed disinformation agency that purchased 3,500 ads on Facebook during the 2016 campaign with the intent of undermining American political consensus. The affidavit describes directions given to IRA’s writers.

Forcefully support Michael Savage’s point of view with competence and honesty. Savage made it clear that any attempt to remove Trump is a direct path to a civil war in the United States. Name those who oppose the president and those who impede his efforts to implement his pre-election promises. Focus on the fact that the Anti-Trump Republicans: a) drag their feet with regard to financing the construction of the border wall; b) are not lowering taxes; c) slander Trump and harm his reputation (bring up McCain); d) do not want to cancel Obamacare; e) are not in a hurry to adopt laws that oppose the refugees coming from Middle Eastern countries entering this country. Summarize that in case Republicans will not stop acting as traitors, they will bring upon themselves forces of civil retribution during the 2018 elections.

Over at Trump-friendly Russia Today, op-ed writer Robert Bridge bolstered the civil war talk with a piece headlined “Democrats’ push to impeach Trump is just the latest chapter of US Civil War 2.0,” in which he concluded, “What is happening now in Washington DC between the Republicans and Democrats is just mere dress rehearsal for far more disasters down the road. I just hope the costumes don’t end up being blue and gray, once again.”

new

https://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2010/01/texas-republicans-back-away-from-arrested-activist-who-had-targeted-acorn/

ACORN KILLED 2009?

Texas Republicans back away from arrested activist who had targeted ACORN

By Stewart Powell on January 28, 2010 at 4:45 PM

Rep. Pete Olson

That was then.

And this is now.

A proposed resolution introduced in October by a Houston-area congressman and supported by seven fellow Texas Republicans called for the House to honor investigative videographer and conservative activist James O’Keefe III and girlfriend Hannah Giles for “fact-finding reporting” that brought to light allegedly “fraudulent and illegal practices” by ACORN, a community action organization that had received federal funding.

The young couple, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, made a hidden-camera video of ACORN employees allegedly counseling them on how to win tax breaks for a hypothetical brothel.

The secret video provoked a political firestorm last summer among critics of ACORN, whose full name is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN often recruits new inner-city and minority voters many of whom sign up as Democrats.

The resolution submitted to the House on Oct. 7 by Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, had support from 31 Republican co-sponsors. Those included Texans Joe Barton, Louie Gohmert, Ralph Hall, John Carter, John Culberson, Kay Granger and Kenny Marchant.

The O’Keefe-Giles video “resulted in the potential annual savings of millions of taxpayer dollars” by prompting the House to vote to defund the organization, the resolution said.

The couple “displayed exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending,” the resolution continued.

On Monday, O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested in New Orleans, accused of taking part in a conspiracy to wiretap the New Orleans office phone of Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat.

The four young men were charged by the FBI with a plot to allegedly “interfere with a telephone system” in Landrieu’s office.

If convicted, the four could face up to 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.

O’Keefe’s attorney, Michael Madigan, said his client did not engage in any illegal activity.

Olson, who sponsored the House resolution praising O’Keefe for his ACORN disclosure, said “individuals who lawfully expose wrongful activities by an entity like ACORN receiving federal tax dollars should be praised.”

But Olson said “if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office, that is not something I condone. ”

“Citizens have an important role in helping to expose waste and/or fraud when their tax dollars are being spent, but it must be done in a lawful manner,” Olson added.

Megan Mitchell, spokeswoman for Culberson, responded to the charges against O’Keefe on behalf of her boss, a Houston Republican who co-sponsored Olson’s resolution.

Culberson “does not condone this behavior nor does he condone ACORN’s abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars,” Mitchell said.

In response to critics’ suggestions that sponsors withdraw the proposed House resolution, the sponsors checked with the House Parliamentarian.

According to the House Parliamentarian, once a resolution has been offered to the House, it can only be amended if it reaches committee action.

It cannot be withdrawn.

rant in impeachment, conjures fear (matching phone # got nunes?]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/republicans-have-become-a-cult-run-by-crooks-former-gop-congressional-staffer-explains-why-the-party-has-become-a-creepy-mashup-of-grade-b-totalitarianism-and-freudian-manias/

no lnx many

‘Republicans have become a cult run by crooks’: Former GOP congressional staffer explains why the party ‘has become a creepy mashup of grade B totalitarianism’ and ‘Freudian manias’

Written by Mike Lofgren / Common Dreams November 3, 2019

Item: Bob Livingston. Remember him? When last seen by the wider public in the waning, innocent years of the 20th century, he was the newly minted designee to succeed Newt Gingrich as Republican Speaker of the House.

But he abruptly resigned after it was revealed (thanks to the public service of Larry Flynt) that he had indulged in extramarital affairs. This was something of an inconvenience, given that he was tapped to lead the charge of the light brigade against incumbent president Bill Clinton, impeaching the latter because of his shocking dalliances outside matrimonial bonds.

Unlike you or me in similar circumstances, Livingston, a cog in the great clockwork of Republican influence-peddling, landed on his feet. Founding a lobbying shop modestly named the Livingston Group, he developed a brisk business of green-washing dictators (such as Muammar al-Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak), fighting against formal recognition of the Turkish genocide of Armenians in World War I, and other worthy causes of clients with money.

“Today’s GOP has become a creepy mashup of grade B totalitarianism and perverted Freudian manias disguised as family values.”

Who could have imagined that Bob Livingston would link up with Giuliani and Associates to press the case that the United States needed to dump our career diplomatic personnel who actually knew something about Ukraine in favor of more transactional go-getters who would vigorously press the case that Kiev needed to get on board the Trump reelection campaign?

If you knew Livingston back in the day, you certainly could imagine it, because of course you could. Bob is the breed of Republican that Reagan inspired and Gingrich liberated, the breed that believes it’s all mine, the public be damned, accompanied by a hundred sermons from Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. The breezy sunlit uplands of their dearest ideals are carpeted with money, soon to be whisked off to an offshore tax haven.

Will Bob end up at a witness table before the House intelligence committee, or in the stand at a grand jury proceeding? Who knows? He is just one element of the massive conservative infrastructure that weighs upon and dominates Washington like some monstrous stone idol. Future historians will boggle at the sheer numbers of the Republican establishment involved in covering up Trump’s illicit activities.

Item: By now, everyone who follows politics has heard of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Ukrainian “businessmen” (but only in the sense that Al Capone or Lucky Luciano were businessmen) who were arrested at Dulles airport while attempting to flee the country. Embarrassingly, they were business chums of Nosferatu-lookalike Rudy Giuliani, our very own president’s personal lawyer. They face charges of making illegal political campaign contributions.

But thanks to a local Michigan political blog, we now know that Parnas also traveled the country campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates. Not only has he been photographed several times yukking it up with Giuliani and the local GOP Great White Hope, but the events he attended often coincided with contributions made by someone with a name that looks suspiciously like Fruman’s, with two letters transposed.

Proving what—aside from providing additional clues about illegal contributions by a foreign national? Parnas and Fruman also acted as agents of Dimitry Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire described by federal prosecutors as an organized crime associate. He made most of his money extracting vigorish from the Russia-Ukraine natural gas trade.

It is difficult to imagine Firtash obtaining such a lucrative cash cow without being a de facto agent of the Kremlin; in fact, Putin advanced him an $11 billion credit line to buy influence in Ukrainian politics. Oh, he was also an associate of Paul Manafort. Remember him?

Firtash is currently in Vienna, fighting U.S. extradition charges that include bribery, racketeering, and money laundering. And, behold, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, the Nick and Nora Charles of GOP dirty operatives, have signed up to help defend this poor, friendless billionaire. Who could have imagined?

The tentacles of Russian organized crime, both the official kind emanating from the Kremlin and the more informal sort consisting of laundering hot cash into real estate, have slithered more deeply into the American heartland than most people realize, and it has colonized the Republican Party at the state and local level. The revelation that the National Rifle Association—variously described as an arm of the GOP or as the party’s master—was virtually taken over by Russian interests is just the tip of the iceberg.

The GOP, which loves to shriek from the housetops about its patriotism, is about as independent of hostile foreign influence as Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling or Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Or, for that matter, France’s Vichy Republic, ever subservient to Nazi Germany.

Item: The other day, I had lunch with the Washington correspondent of a respected overseas newspaper. He recounted that he recently had covered an event at which Greg Murphy, a Republican member of Congress from North Carolina, was in attendance. The member was very loquacious in support of the imaginary “fact” that Republicans were totally shut out of the hearings pertaining to the impeachment inquiry.

The correspondent gently remonstrated that it was public knowledge that any Republican who was a member of the three committees making the inquiry could and did take part in the proceedings. The member then merely repeated, with greater emphasis, that the Republicans were “shut out.” The journalist described the congressman’s face as having changed to something like an android, with blank eyes and a fixed stare. On cue, he had transformed himself into a zombie.

It did not help that the event occurred in a NATO ally’s embassy, where the congressman pounded the table and announced to all and sundry that he was so ashamed of liberals in this country gleefully burning American flags. What?

The correspondent speculated to me that there were, in fact, recent televised scenes of flag burnings, but they were staged by Kurds in Syria disgusted at their betrayal by the president on whose behalf the congressman had lobotomized himself. In the congressman’s mind, facts and reality were infinitely fluid, and perhaps the Kurds might as well have been the liberals who haunt his dreams.

He was all too typical of today’s Republican politician: whether he was attempting to gaslight his audience or whether he actually believed what he said is impossible to determine and probably irrelevant anyway. Like a Scientologist, his ideas cannot be rationally debated. It is best simply to avoid the species: insanity is contagious.

****

What are we to make of all this? The notion, beloved by the press, that Trump holds Republicans in a kind of thrall, like the Klingons’ tractor beam, does not withstand scrutiny, because there is no evidence that the GOP will resume normal behavior once the beam is switched off. They have been getting crazier and crazier for years, which is why I departed Capitol Hill in 2011 to spread the news to all who would listen.

Republicans have now become seriously deranged, and even more cult-like. Louie Gohmert, once a comical outlier, but now the heart and soul of his party, is invoking civil war as a remedy to the potential impeachment of his beloved Führer. And for sheer cringe-inducing weirdness, nothing matches the GOP’s fixation with abortion once they achieve power, which has now reached an almost unbelievable stage of sick obsession in Missouri. Today’s GOP has become a creepy mashup of grade B totalitarianism and perverted Freudian manias disguised as family values.

Once, I called them an apocalyptic cult, which they were and are. But in those relatively naïve days, even I underestimated their growing appetite for crime, betrayal, and certifiable lunacy.

pizzagaetz:

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/meet-the-far-right-house-members-who-stormed-secure-hearing-room/

more than two dozen Republican House members stormed a closed-door hearing with a top Pentagon official on Wednesday morning in protest of the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump.

The storming stunt was staged a day after Trump had a White House meeting with members of the Freedom Caucus–who were among the Republicans storming the hearing–and has complained in recent days that Republicans have not been strong or vocal enough in their defense of him.

The House Republicans caused a five-hour delay, broke House rules, and compromised security by bringing cellphones and other electronic devices into the secure facility, where they are not allowed to protect sensitive information. One member, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, even tweeted from the secure hearing room, called the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF (pronounced “skiff”).

So who are these security-flouting congressmen and congresswomen? We rounded up a few that have graced our pages here at Right Wing Watch.

Matt Gaetz

“I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions,” Gaetz said on Twitter Wednesday morning. On Thursday, he compared himself to Spartans in the Movie “300,” telling TMZ, “We were like the 300s, standing in the breach to try to stop the radical left from storming over our democracy.”

Gaetz may now be best known for leading the stunt, but there’s plenty more to know about him. In 2018, he tried to impede efforts to count all the ballots in the tight Florida Senate race between Rick Scott and Bill Nelson. As Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported at the time:

Gaetz told listeners of “Breitbart News Daily” on SirusXM that Republicans should push back on the vote-counting efforts without fear of outraging voters.

“If the Democrats were in charge and this was happening in a Republican county, do you think that those supervisors of elections would still have jobs? I mean, they’d be gone. They’d be out on their rear ends,” Gaetz said.

…

Gaetz said that Democrats will never “get better” and “treat us better,” so it’s important that Republicans “take the gloves off and fight like they do.”

Gaetz also pushed a conspiracy theory that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee authored a secret memo that “proves that the Obama administration improperly sought to spy on Donald Trump and his presidential campaign,” Holt wrote in 2018. Gaetz appeared on the conspiracy-theory outlet Infowars to complain about being labeled a conspiracy theorist. Gaetz also pushed a conspiracy theory that progressive billionaire donor George Soros organized and funded a ”caravan” of migrants.

And in 2018, Gaetz brought Chuck Johnson, a right-wing political operative who has posted Holocaust-denying statements online, to Trump’s State of the Union address.

Louie Gohmert

After storming the secure room, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas reportedly started a shouting match with Democratic lawmakers.

Recently, Gohmert has claimed he knows the identity of the whistleblower who raised the red flag on Trump’s call to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which the U.S. president asked Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. Gohmert’s assertion is based on a conspiracy theory involving the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. But Gohmert is best known on our pages for homophobic remarks. In 2016, he said homosexuality was to blame for the flood described in the biblical story of Noah. Right Wing Watch’s Brian Tashman reported on a speech Gohmert gave on the House floor in 2016:

But due to the attacks on “natural order” and religious freedom, Gohmert said, “we don’t have much longer to go.”

Gohmert also cited the work of Jonathan Cahn, a far-right End Times preacher who believes God is punishing America (and France) due to gay marriage with events such as the 9/11 attacks, to assert that the end is near.

He also claimed that transgender people are disordered and “perverse” individuals who need help.

Gohmert also claimed that sexual abuse turned boys gay, stating in 2016, “the boys just seemed like, universally, they ended up feeling that they were gay.”

Debbie Lesko

A fervent supporter of Trump, Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko stormed the secure Capitol room and expressed her outrage about how the impeachment inquiry process was being handled.

Lesko has boosted the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory and supported anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. In June, Lesko attacked social media companies that had made it harder for users to find anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. As the Daily Beast reported then:

A Republican lawmaker slammed Facebook and Google on Wednesday for making it harder to find anti-vaccine content on their platforms, calling the companies’ efforts to stop the spread of the conspiracy theories “really scary stuff.”

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) attacked the platforms’ efforts at a House Homeland Security committee hearing on online terrorism and disinformation, where representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter faced their latest round of grilling from lawmakers.

…

Medical professionals and public officials have all warned that disinformation about vaccines (including a persistent and pernicious conspiracy that they can lead to autism) has fed public health epidemics. But Lesko suggested that anti-vaccine theories are just a difference of opinion.

“What you deem as inaccurate, I do not deem as inaccurate, or other people may not deem,” she said.

Lesko is also an anti-abortion activist and believes “God has put me on a mission,” to be anti-choice, Lesko said at Family Research Council’s “Pro-Life Con” earlier this year.

Andy Biggs

Andy Biggs, the former president of the Arizona Senate, was among those leading the charge to disrupt the hearing and called the hearings “secret, Soviet-style, Stalinist” on Wednesday. On Monday, Biggs forced a vote in the House to censure Rep. Adam Schiff, which failed.

In 2015, Biggs sat silent when the founder of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia group, called for the hanging of Sen. John McCain of Arizona. As Right Wing Watch reported at the time:

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told a Phoenix television station yesterday that he called for the hanging of Arizona Sen. John McCain last week because McCain “is every bit as nuts as Adolf Hitler was.”

Rhodes made the comment while sitting next to Andy Biggs, the president of the Arizona Senate, who has said that he didn’t speak up because criticizing Rhodes would have violated his “free-speech rights.”

Steve King

White supremacist Rep. Steve King of Iowa was also among the lawmakers who stormed the SCIF. King may be best known for comments he made to the New York Times earlier this year in which he defended white nationalism.

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

The New York Times reported:

At the same time, he said, he supports immigrants who enter the country legally and fully assimilate because what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.

But before his comments to the Times, King promoted white supremacists on his Twitter and has made other racist comments. In 2018, King quote-tweeted Lana Lokteff, who spread white supremacist hate on YouTube via the hate channel, Red Ice. Holt reported at the time:

In June, King promoted Mark Collett, a well-established British neo-Nazi. Additionally, King has a reputation for professing white-nationalist rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, once comparing them to livestock, and racial demographics in America, claiming “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Tags: Andy BiggsDebbie LeskoLouie GohmertRep. Louie GohmertRep. Matt GaetzRep. Steve KingSteve KingImpeachmentRepublican Party

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hate-had-a-meeting-in-the-white-house/

President Donald Trump met with two representatives of groups that lobby for bigoted anti-immigrant policies at the White House this month, The New York Times reports.

Frank Gaffney of the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and Rosemary Jenks of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA joined Rep. Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair in a meeting with Trump and a handful of White House aides. During the meeting, multiple comments were put forward to the president that many Americans would find offensive, including claims that gay marriage was destroying America.

In addition, some members of the group complained to the president that their suggested candidates for administration positions had been ignored. Some reportedly “also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration”—a claim popularized in pro-Trump social media circles.

The meeting was organized by Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas’ political activity has raised concerns about conflicts of interest for her husband, the Times reported, and she once hired a young activist who was ousted from the organization Turning Point USA after writing in a text message: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”

Thomas founded a conservative advocacy group that would later merge with the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty. She used to write columns for The Daily Caller and was once employed at the Heritage Foundation.

In 2017, Thomas gave awards to right-wing activists including James O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. She has appeared as a speaker alongside her husband at an Eagle Forum conference in Washington, where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric was a staple in multiple presentations. In 2013, Thomas discussed “cultural Marxism” with the late anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly—a conspiracy theory that was originally coined by an anti-Semites and white nationalists in the 1990s that alleged Jews were trying to degrade Western societies for their own benefits.

The White House meeting was scheduled for this month after “months of delay.” From The Times:

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy have enjoyed increased access to government officials in the Trump era and cheered on the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and initiatives, such as the travel ban. NumbersUSA began as a program of a foundation run by John Tanton, who advocated for immigration policies that would maintain United States’ majority-white status. (Tanton has also published, through his The Social Contract Press, white nationalists and anti-Semites.) In 2015, NumbersUSA chided Trump for not being anti-immigrant enough.

jared holt, corrected

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, took exception to YouTube’s partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a “trusted flagger” of dangerous content that violates the platform’s terms of service. CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported Gohmert as saying, “The Southern Poverty Law Center has really stirred up more hate than any other group that I’ve known.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fox-news-actually-apologizes-after-texas-congressman-goes-anti-semitic-rant

no lnx

Fox News actually apologizes after Texas congressman goes on anti-Semitic rant

In a truly tortured segue, Gohmert connected George Orwell to another George—Soros. Get it?

By Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos December 7, 2018, 6:20 AM GMT

Fox Business’s Stuart Varney, a man that somehow makes Piers Morgan sound less smarmy, had wildly dumb Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert on his show Thursday morning. Varney was hosting a segment about how the tech giant Google has been willing to be complicit in the Chinese government’s censorship of the internet in order to penetrate the Chinese marketplace. Attacking Google for its complete lack of ethics is totally warranted, but of course the reason that Fox News is attacking Google is in order to build the vilification of China, justifying Trump’s incoherent trade while attacking a company perceived as being “liberal.” Rep. Louie Gohmert is sort of like having a drug-fueled 1970s rock-and-roll legend on your show—sure they’re narcissistic and terribly erratic asshats, but they will likely make for some entertaining television.

Gohmert makes a clearly well-worn and on-brand right-wing conspiracy joke about George Orwell. He then explains how Google has “literally sold their souls” to China. Classic rock god antics! Literally! Of course, the problem with putting an erratic and unsophisticated mind and mouth in front of a microphone is that, so very frequently, they veer off into truly insane (and thinly-veiled) anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

In a truly tortured segue, Gohmert connected George Orwell to another George—Soros. Get it?

Gohmert: You mention Orwell, it reminds me of another George, ah George Soros. Because Google is born in a free country and they go over and oppress others, help oppress others in another country. George Soros is supposed to be Jewish but you wouldn't know it from the damage he inflicted on Israel and the fact that he turned on fellow Jews & helped take the property that they owned.

Varney quickly moved on, probably afraid that Gohmert would pull out his Glenn Beck blackboard to begin drawing lines between Hitler, the Rothschilds, George Soros, and black ops helicopters. If Louie Gohmert has a “brand,” it’s called “Batshit Crazy.” But the awfulness of the claim, so grotesquely wedged into a conversation about China, clearly stuck in someone’s craw at Fox Business, and according to the Daily Beast, Varney made an on-air apology later in the segment.

In the following broadcast hour, Varney issued an on-air apology for Gohmert’s remarks: “Congressman Louie Gohmert, for some reason went out of his way to bring up George Soros and made unsubstantiated and false allegations against him. I want to make clear those views are not shared by me, this program or anyone at Fox Business.”

This isn’t the first, second, or last time he’s publicly promoted the abhorrent George Soros as a Nazi collaborator meme. But here’s a quick primer on George Soros:

When World War II began, and Jews were swept up into camps, with more than 6 million ending up systematically murdered by the Third Reich. George Soros was 9-year-old Jew living in Hungary with his family when the war began. Soros was 14 years old when the Nazis occupied Hungary, and his family forged false identification papers and split up, in order to escape being sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Soros and his father forged similar papers for other Hungarian Jews during that time, before leaving the country and relocating in England.

The erroneous meme about Soros that has taken off in right wing circles originated with Glenn Beck—back when he was the heinous Glenn Beck we all remember. An old 60 Minutes interview with Soros shows him explaining how, at 14—charged with pretending he was the Christian child of an Hungarian officer—he had to watch as Hungarian and Nazi officials stole away the property of Jewish citizens who had been sent to their likely deaths in concentration camps.

None of us can know how we would have responded under the kinds of circumstances people like George Soros were put in as children—and adults—during World War II. But I will bet you another blue wave in 2020 that at 14, Louie Gohmert would have sold his family to the devil to keep his hair.

Mad Politics

Gina Loudon, Fox News guest analyst and member of the Trump 2020 Campaign Media Advisory Board, offered her analysis of the political climate. She was interviewed by Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX).

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/once-again-congress-entertained-debunked-accusations-that-conservatives-are-censored-online/

Members of the House Judiciary Committee gathered this morning to entertain, once again, the repeatedly debunked accusations that social media websites like Facebook systemically censor conservative viewpoints on ideological grounds.

This morning, Rep. Bob Goodlatte and his colleagues hosted representatives from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for a public hearing during which it was advertised that company representatives would “answer questions on their content moderation practices and how they can be better stewards of free speech in the United States and abroad.” Although the hearing did include a hodgepodge of inquiries about censorship, algorithm design and suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 election, many GOP members of the committee used their time to hammer tech companies with mythical nonsense straight out of Infowars (speaking of which, Infowars host Alex Joneshas claimednumerous times on air during the last week that the White House and members of Congress have asked him to produce a report on the bias conservatives say they face online.)

In a tweet advertising the public hearing, the House Judiciary Committee posed the question, “So, why am I getting shadowbanned?”:[twit]

View image on Twitter[twit]

Twitter Ads info and privacy

1 Terror babies

2 Xenophobic synergy

3 Anti-vaccine quackery

4 See also

5 External links

6 Footnotes

[edit]Terror babies

Gohmert frequently makes what are almost certainly off-the-cuff (albeit dumb) remarks, and when called on them, defends them to the death rather than admit he was wrong.

The best example of this is his "terror babies" idea, where Gohmert repeatedly claimed that terrorists were impregnating women, sending them to the US, waiting for the babies to be born as "anchor babies," flying them back to wherever they came from, waiting twenty to thirty years so the babies can grow up and be trained as terrorists, and then sending them back to the US where they can gain easy entry to blow up the country. He first introduced this idea in a speech on the House floor in 2010.

In response, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interviewed an FBI official on his show to debunk the terror babies claim (Gohmert asserted that the FBI had reported terror baby incidents). Gohmert then appeared on Cooper's show and refused to provide any evidence of terror babies.[14] Xenophobic think tank Center for Immigration Studies attempted to back him up with a report on terror babies, but provided no evidence except for some statistics on illegal immigration and conspiratorial insinuations.[15]

[edit]Xenophobic synergy

In a speech delivered to a Longview Chamber of Commerce in Texas, Gohmert voiced his fears that "Radical Islamists" were infiltrating the United States by impersonating Latinos.[16]

[edit]Anti-vaccine quackery

He takes a different line of insanity on the issue than fellow weirdos travelers like Jenny McCarthy or Michele Bachmann; he's opposed to them because liberal elites are culling the earth's human population through their use in order to preserve natural resources, not because of any false safety concerns drummed up by anti-vax shills. According to Gohmert, this conspiracy is aiming for a target human population of around 700 million people, which would constitute less than ten percent of the estimated current human population.[17]

[edit]See also

Fourteenth Amendment

[edit]External links

Terror Babies on The Daily Show.

[edit]Footnotes

↑ Mary Ann Akers. "Birthers, the Few, the Proud, Riling Capitol Hill." The Sleuth, The Washington Post. 2009 July 30.

↑ "Gohmert is a tea party kind of guy. A staple of their rallies, he voted against every stimulus and bailout proposal brought to the House floor when the economy was in a tailspin, making him a fiscal conservative rock star in tea partiers' eyes." —Stephanie Mencimer. "Rep. Louie "Terror Babies" Gohmert: Tea Party Pick for House Leadership." Mother Jones. 2010 December 8.

↑ At least, enough to not lose or be frozen out of the political process.

↑ Sara Kenigsberg. "Obamacare Is Socialism: Reps. Louie Gohmert, Steve King Attack ." Huffington Post. 2012 March 27.

↑ Jed Babbin. "Pay No Tax for Two Months?" Human Events. 2008 December 1.

↑ 6.0 6.1 Pat Garofalo. "Gohmert opposes estate tax extension because 'Jesus never advocated the government go steal.'" 2009 December 3.

↑ 7.0 7.1 Michael Allen. "Rep. Louis Gohmert Compares Gun Control to Bestiality (Audio)." Opposing Views. 2013 April 2.

↑ Nick Wing. "Rep. Louie Gohmert: Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Threatens American 'Existence' (VIDEO)." Huffington Post. 2011 May 25.

↑ 9.0 9.1 Marie Diamond. "Rep. Gohmert Calls Obama’s Jobs Plan An Assault On Marriage That Encourages Divorce." Think Progress. 2011 October 5.

↑ Matt Finkelstein. "Rep. Gohmert Touts Column Comparing Obama To Hitler Over Handling Of BP." Political Correction. Media Matters. 2010 June 23.

↑ Louis Gohmert on the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act of 2009. C-SPAN. 2009 April 21.

↑ Emily Heil. "Louie Gohmert: Best caribou wingman ever." In the Loop, Washington Post. 2012 February 7.

↑ Lee Fang. "Rep. Louie Gohmert: Hate crimes bill will lead to Nazism, legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality."ThinkProgress. 2009 October 7.

↑ Eric Kleefeld. "Anderson Cooper Grills Shouting GOPer Louie Gohmert On 'Terror Babies' Conspiracy (VIDEO)." Talking Points Memo. 2010 August 13.

↑ Adam Serwer. "Terror Babies Go Legit." The American Prospect. 2011 March 16.

↑ David Edwards."Gohmert: ‘Radical Islamists’ taking Spanish lessons ‘because we don’t fear Hispanics’", The Raw Story, Friday, August 9, 2013 9:31 EDT

↑ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/27/gohmert-scary-that-liberal-elites-would-use-vaccines-for-culling-the-population-of-humans/Gohmert: ‘Scary’ that liberal elites would use vaccines for ‘culling the population’ of humans,] The Raw Story

Categories: Conspiracy theorists Extreme wingnuttery Islamophobia Members of the United States House of Representatives Tea Party

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday said that it was a “scary thought” that elites could be culling the population with vaccines to preserve the Earth’s resources.

The Texas Republican spent part of his five-week break from Congress this week by interviewing conservative activist Alan Keyes while filling in as a guest host for Tony Perkins on Family Research Council’s Washington Watch.

Gohmert pointed out that some liberals believed that the Earth was already over populated.

“A lot of people who fancy themselves elites, right, because they’ve made a lot of money, their names are all over the media and so forth, they’ve really signed on to an agenda that requires the depopulation of the globe,” Keyes explained. “And in the name of fighting global climatological change, called global warming — that’s proven to be something that’s wrong — they are saying that we’ve got to cut back the population of the world.”

“Bill Gates gave a famous talk back in 2009, which he was talking about actually abusing vaccinations, which are supposed to keep people healthy and alive, and saying how this could lead to a 15 percent reduction in the population of the globe as a way to achieve this result,” he continued.

Keyes warned that elites had a plan to reduce the number of people in the world to 700 million “by culling the population.”

“They’re preaching that doctrine because they actually believe we’re a blight on the face of the planet, we human beings,” Keyes said. “And we should, therefore, be put on a path toward our own semi-extinction. I often try to get people to see that if you think about it, if we actually get back to the levels they’re talking about, it would just be these elitists and the people needed to service them. That’s all that will be left in the world.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Gohmert agreed.

Watch this video from the Family Research Council, broadcast Aug. 26, 2013.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/27/gohmert-scary-that-liberal-elites-would-use-vaccines-for-culling-the-population-of-humans/

I can't make out anything (of the crucial phrase) except "…((cast)) aspersions on my asparagus".

When I first heard this, I wondered whether it was some kind of down-home idiom. But I haven't been able to turn up any evidence for this view, so apparently it's just an unexpected Fay-Cutler malapropism for "cast aspersions on my character".

Update — In the comments, Dick Margulis and Jon Weinberg present evidence that this was in fact an idiom choice and not a speech error; and Cameron Majidi locates the locus classicus (though of a slightly different form of the joke).

I missed this reference myself, but it's definitely a symptom of the Decline of the West that nobody at the Colbert Report, the Washington Post, or The Guardian caught it. stooges

Tea Party congressman mansplains his anti-abortion views. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), speaking at a hearing about an unconstitutional ban on abortion after 20 weeks that House Republicans are championing, told a witness that she should've been forced to wait and give birth rather than have an abortion even though her fetus had no brain function.

Louie Gohmert, a Republican, has represented the First Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2005. (map)

Contents

[hide]

1 Record and controversies

1.1 Iraq War

1.2 Environmental record

1.3 Pays wife for campaign work

1.4 DC voting rights

2 Bio

2.1 Congressional career

2.1.1 2006 elections

3 Money in politics

4 More Background Data

5 Committees and Affiliations

5.1 Committees

5.1.1 Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)

6 Contact

7 Articles and resources

7.1 Local blogs and discussion sites

Record and controversies

General information about important bills and votes for can be found in Congresspedia's articles on legislation. You can add information you find on how Louie Gohmert voted by clicking the "[edit]" link to the right and typing it in. Remember to cite your sources!

Iraq War

For more information see the chart of U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Iraq War.

Environmental record

For more information on environmental legislation, see the Energy and Environment Policy Portal

Pays wife for campaign work

In October 2006, the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit organization which advocates better transparency in government, reported that Gohmert’s campaign committee paid his wife $53,261 to serve as the campaign’s assistant manager during 2005-2006. [1]

DC voting rights

When the District of Columbia Fair and Equal Voting Rights Act of 2007 came under consideration of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Gohmert threatened to introduce up to 43 amendments to the bill to protest granting a House vote to a non-state. Members voted on only one of the Gohmert amendments, a measure which would have made certain military installations congressional districts (it failed).

Main article: District of Columbia Fair and Equal Voting Rights Act of 2007

Bio

Prior to being elected to serve in Congress, Gohmert was elected to three terms as District Judge in Smith County, Texas. He was later appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry to complete a term as Chief Justice of the 12th Court of Appeals.

In 2004, he successfully defeated Democratic incumbent 1st District Congressman Max Sandlin for his seat in Congress; becoming the first Republican since Reconstruction to represent the 1st District of Texas. Representative Louie Gohmert was first sworn in January 4, 2005 by Speaker Dennis Hastert as representative for the First District of Texas.

Now into his second term in the House of Representatives, Gohmert is assigned to three key House committees: Judiciary, Resources and Small Business. Gohmert is the only former judge on the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over matters such as constitutional issues, immigration, the Federal courts, crime, and law enforcement. He was named Ranking Member on the Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security and also returns to the Judiciary subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims.

Rep. Gohmert sits on the House Committee on Natural Resources. He serves on two subcommittees: Energy and Mineral Resources as well as National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

Gohmert received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University, where he was class president, and served as a Brigade Commander of the Corps of Cadets. He was also Class President while attending Baylor School of Law. He is a veteran, having served his country as captain in the U.S. Army as a result of an Army scholarship at Texas A&M.

Having grown up in Mt. Pleasant, Texas, where he was an Eagle Scout, Gohmert has been an active volunteer in numerous civic organizations in East Texas.

Congressional career

2006 elections

In 2006, the Democrats nominated Roger L. Owen to face Gohmert in his November 2006 bid for reelection. (See U.S. congressional elections in 2006) [2] Gohmert retained his seat.

Money in politics

This section contains links to – and feeds from – money in politics databases. cid=N00026148&cycle=2006

Links to more campaign contribution information for Louie Gohmert

from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.

Fundraising profile: 2006 election cycle Career totals

Top contributors by organization/corporation: 2006 election cycle Career totals

Top contributors by industry: 2006 election cycle Career totals

Revolving door profile for Louie Gohmert from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.

2006 privately funded travel profile for Louie Gohmert from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.

Personal finance profile for Louie Gohmert from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.

More Background Data

Background information on Louie Gohmert from Project Vote Smart

Interest group scorecard ratings for Louie Gohmert from Project Vote Smart

Voting record for Louie Gohmert from the Washington Post database

Information on Louie Gohmert from Congress Merge

Wikipedia also has an article on Louie Gohmert. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

Committees and Affiliations

Committees

House Committee on the Judiciary

Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security

Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims

House Committee on Natural Resources

Subcommittee on Enery and Mineral Resources

Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lans

House Committee on Small Business

Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, Ranking Member

Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)

House Committee on the Judiciary

Subcommittee on Task Force on Antirust

Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law

Subcommittee on Crime Terrorism and Homeland Security

Subcommittee on Immigration Border Security and Claims

House Committee on Resources

Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources

Subcommittee on Water and Power

House Committee on Small Business

Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight

Contact

Career Fundraising

1989 - 2012 Total Receipts: $5,201,721

1989 - 2012 Total Spent: $4,962,737

Debts: $0

Last Report: Saturday, June 30, 2012

Top 5 Contributors, 2004 - 2012

Contributor Total Indivs PACs

First State Bank & Trust $36,800 $36,800 $0

Southside Bank $35,550 $35,550 $0

Logan & Whaley $28,688 $28,688 $0

AT&T Inc $27,250 $250 $27,000

Citizens First Bank $24,300 $24,300 $0

...view more data

Top 5 Industries, 2004 - 2012

Industry Total Indivs PACs

Retired $474,234 $474,234 $0

Health Professionals $401,081 $364,481 $36,600

Oil & Gas $321,913 $255,663 $66,250

Misc Finance $244,860 $238,360 $6,500

Leadership PACs $204,544 $1,000 $203,544

...view more data

First State Bank & Trust $40,300 $40,300 $0

Southside Bank $38,050 $38,050 $0

AT&T Inc $30,250 $250 $30,000

Newfield Exploration Co $29,000 $29,000 $0

Logan & Whaley $28,688 $28,688 $0

Krohn Internal Medicine Assn $26,400 $26,400 $0

Martin Gas Co $26,378 $26,378 $0

Atlas Credit $26,150 $26,150 $0

Energy Future Holdings Corp $25,500 $2,000 $23,500

Koch Industries $24,500 $0 $24,500

Dermatology Assoc of Tyler $24,400 $24,400 $0

Citizens First Bank $24,300 $24,300 $0

DalenPAC $23,000 $0 $23,000

National Beer Wholesalers Assn $22,500 $0 $22,500

Landmark Title $22,400 $22,400 $0

Pippen Motor Co $22,400 $22,400 $0

Mustang Drilling $21,150 $21,150 $0

Tyler Packing $20,700 $20,700 $0

Mustang Engineering $20,450 $20,450 $0

National Assn of Realtors $20,000 $0 $20,000

Three oil companies are undertaking most of the drilling on the Blackfeet Reservation at present: Denver-based Anschutz Exploration Corp. and Rosetta Resources and Newfield Exploration Co. of Houston. Though the drilling is simply exploratory at this point, with no definitive results announced, the fact that the Blackfeet Reservation makes up part of the Bakken Shale formation – which is currently spurring an oil boom in Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota – means a good chance exists that the wells on the Blackfeet Reservation could lead to steady production, along with millions in royalties for the Tribe.

Recently, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) has beens sounding the alarm about a new and insidious plot involving so called "terror babies." Infants are sometimes known to be terrors in their own right, but this diabolical plan involves terrorists sending pregnant women into the US to birth their America-hating spawns. The mothers and their kids then return home where, the congressman says, the children "could be raised and coddled as future terrorists"— and later, "twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life." Gohmert, a member of the newly formed Tea Party Caucus and a supporter of a bill stemming from the "birther" conspiracy about the president's citizenship, has used the far-fetched terror baby conspiracy to bash the Obama administration's immigration policy and its legal challenge to Arizona's draconian law. "They figured out how stupid we are being in this country to allow our enemies to game our system," he said during a debate on the House floor in late June. "We won’t do anything about it we’ll even sue a state that tries to do something about it."

Here's the thing: There doesn't appear to be a morsel of evidence to support Gohmert's terror baby tale, which the congressman says he learned of from a woman on a plane while en route to the Middle East and from a retired FBI agent. (The FBI says it has no information about such a plot. And former top bureau official Tom Fuentes has called Gohmert's claims "ludicrous.") So last night Anderson Cooper featured Gohmert and his terror babies plot in the show's "Keeping Them Honest" segment. What followed was about 9 minutes of high-quality crazy, courtesy of a congressman known for making outlandish claims and staking out unorthodox and outright bizarre positions.

Gohmert was in feisty form and quickly came unhinged ("you're going to keep me honest!" he thundered), blasting Cooper for calling him out for political fear-mongering. "You're attacking the messenger," Gohmert yelled. "Anderson, you're better than this. You used to be good. You used to find that there was a problem and go after it instead of going after the messenger." Gohmert grow ever more irate, as Cooper repeatedly pressed him to provide any credible information to back up his claims. "Sir, do you want to offer any evidence?" Cooper asked at one point. "I'm giving up an opportunity to say what research and evidence you have. You've offered none, other then yelling." Let's just say Gohmert declined Cooper's offer. Just watch this clip. You won't be dissappointed. And, while you're watching, keep in mind that Gohmert is a former district and appeals court judge. mojo

Wednesday Rep Louie Gohmert (R-TX), had some choice words for the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler. In House Judiciary Committee hearings, the Texas Republican took exception to Wheeler’s claim that the FCC had moved to take over the Internet at the request of Congress.

Rep Gohmert asked, “What from Congress asked the FCC to look at rules regarding the Internet? Wheeler responded with a justification based upon the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Gohmert mocks a nineteen year-old “justification” as not being legitimate saying the FCC “Seized on that.” Gohmert suggests a more relevant window of the last four years or so as more appropriate.

TWO FIELD ERROR?

1/20 capt

no cure for stupid? poster for?

wacko node, crazy tag

html seized

Freedumb Cockups?

https://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/louie-gohmert

4* 4%

lcv 5-11 % http://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/louie-gohmert

wow, how possible in debt? http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/

Louis B. Gohmert Jr (R-Texas) ranks 436th in the House with an estimated net worth* of $-162,501 in 2012.

he's proud of dumbest member moniker?! agno?

he's a bridge from old koch astro TP to new qanon trumpistas? anglo-saxon caucus?

an 6 22

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said recently that he would tell parents of young children killed in the Uvalde school shooting that "God has a plan."

Paxton, who took the leading role in a failed Supreme Court case aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election, went on a media blitz to fight calls for gun restrictions shortly after an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in the West Texas town of Uvalde.

In an interview with right-wing radio host Trey Graham, Paxton acknowledged that it is "difficult to give comfort" to families who lost their kids. "If I lost one of my children I'd be pretty devastated, especially in a way that is so senseless and seemingly has no purpose," he continued. "I think ... I would just have to say, if I had the opportunity to talk to the people I'd have to say, look, there's always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is. And certainly, we're not going to make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy."

Paxton's comments last week came ahead of emotional testimony by parents of Uvalde victims in the House last week. Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was killed in the attack, pleaded for Congress to take action on gun safety in response to the massacre.

"We understand that for some reason, to some people — to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns — that guns are more important than children," Rubio said while testifying with her husband, Felix. "Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony thinking, 'I can't even imagine their pain,' not knowing that our reality will someday be hers. Unless we act now."

Dr. Roy Guerrero, a Uvalde pediatrician who treated some of the victims, made a similar plea as he described how children's bodies were "pulverized" and "decapitated" by the bullets from the AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman, to the point that "the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them."

"Making sure our children are safe from guns, that's the job of our politicians and leaders," Guerrero said. "In this case, you are the doctors and our country is the patient. We are lying on the operating table, riddled with bullets like the children of Robb Elementary and so many other schools. We are bleeding out, and you are not there. My oath as a doctor means that I signed up to save lives. I do my job, and I guess it turns out that I am here to plead, to beg, to please, please do yours."

But after the heart-wrenching testimony, all but five Republicans in the House voted against a package that would raise the age to buy an AR-15 from 18 to 21 and toughen existing gun laws. Senate Republicans have already ruled out any new gun restrictions, as have Republican state leaders in Texas.

Paxton's immediate response to the shooting was to call for arming teachers, which some schools in Texas already do despite strong pushback from teachers.

"We can't stop bad people from doing bad things. We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer," Paxton said following the shooting.

Other Texas Republicans have also tried to blame anything but widespread easy access to guns. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called for "door control" in schools and Gov. Greg Abbott pushed an emphasis on mental health — despite slashing funds for mental health treatment.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, after Wednesday's hearing suggested that the answer is more "prayer."

"Look, maybe if we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God's name in vain, we wouldn't have the mass killings like we didn't have before prayer was eliminated from school," he said.

Paxton in particular has a long history of opposing gun restrictions in response to mass shootings in Uvalde, El Paso and Sutherland Springs, arguing that mass shooters are "not going to follow a single gun law" even though gun laws prevented the shooter from getting a gun until he turned 18 — the legal age to purchase an AR-15, but not a handgun — just days before the attack.

Paxton has a close relationship with the gun lobby. The NRA, the Texas State Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund have all contributed heavily to his campaigns. Paxton also signed an amicus brief backing the NRA's petition asking the Supreme Court to strike down California's ban on high-capacity magazines. He even "welcomed" the NRA to Texas after the group tried and failed to file for bankruptcy to dodge a corruption investigation by New York's attorney general.

After a gunman killed 26 people in the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting, Paxton argued that the only answer to gun violence was more guns.

"In Texas at least we have the opportunity to have concealed carry," he told Fox News. "And so if it's a place where somebody has the ability to carry, there's always the opportunity that gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many."

After another gunman killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, Paxton again argued that more guns were the answer rather than fewer guns.

"The best way is to be prepared to defend yourself," he told CBS News.

Ironically, Paxton himself cannot buy a gun under federal law, because he has been under indictment since 2015 for breaking state securities law.

Researchers have found no evidence that arming teachers or other school personnel has any effect on school shootings. A review of 89 journal publications and media reports by researchers at the University of Toledo and Ball State University similarly found that armed school resource officers, restrictions on the number of school exits and active-shooter drills do not help either.

The "ideal method for eliminating school firearm violence by youths is to prevent them from ever gaining access to firearms," the researchers concluded, adding that "unfortunately, studies have found an alarming rate of firearms accessible to youths."

gop not allowed to lie to fbi, unfair

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/louie-gohmert-attacks-democrats-prayers/

am fest w/ troll caucus?

an 5 22

Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the baby formula shortage they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.

In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died. The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.

Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.

House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.

On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.

One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair Elise Stefanik‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...

one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.

192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.

Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.

Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.

[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Matt Gaetz

Louie Gohmert

Lauren Boebert

Paul Gosar

Thomas Massie

Andy Biggs

Clay Higgins

Chip Roy.]

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ginni-thomas-texts-mark-meadows/

an 4 22

ginni Thomas, who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been drawing a great deal of scrutiny over reports that after the 2020 presidential election, she urged then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to push for the election results to be overturned. And according to reporting in CNN, one of the people Ginni Thomas mentioned in her texts to Meadows was her friend Connie Hair — a Republican insider who was serving as chief of staff for Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas.

“In her now-infamous texts to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, referred to Hair and claims about election fraud while urging Meadows to fight the election result,” journalists Katelyn Polantz and Andrew Kaczynski report on CNN’s website. “Around that same time, Hair’s boss, Gohmert, filed or supported two lawsuits challenging the election that eventually landed before the Supreme Court.”

The CNN reporters add, “Ginni Thomas’ years-long relationship with Hair, including social outings that Clarence Thomas attended, as well as her texting with Meadows, add another dimension to an ongoing debate over whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, especially when his wife is closely aligned to people who advocated overturning the election.”

After the 2020 presidential election, Hair wasn’t shy about promoting the Big Lie. Hair, in a November 21, 2020 post on Facebook, wrote, “Massive amounts of voter fraud in the big cities throughout the contested states. And the evidence has only just begun to hit the courts.”

Polantz and Kaczynski note that Hair has a long history of associating with the Thomases.

“The Thomases have kept in contact with Hair for years, according to several photos and messages shared on Facebook by Hair and others and obtained by CNN,” Polantz and Kaczynski explain. “In 2016, Hair posted about attending a Colbie Caillat concert, sending her thanks for a ‘fun’ evening to Ginni Thomas…. Hair has worked in Gohmert’s office since 2010, according to congressional staffing records. In 2017, she took a new round of pictures with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, this time inside the justice’s chambers. That day, January 20, 2017, Clarence Thomas had sworn in (Mike) Pence as vice president.”

sued VP big lie = coup?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/louie-gohmert/

Gohmert believes Capitol riot suspects might fare better at Guantanamo Bay

Meaghan Ellis

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) has a bizarre analogy he's concocted to defend U.S. Capitol rioters. The Texas lawmaker actually believes riot suspects being held in pre-trial...

no lnx newsweek

atorney Sidney Powell said the January 6 riot at the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election victory—but that chance was lost when Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress to complete the process.

Powell, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits in a failed bid to overturn former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, made the comments during an appearance on the conservative Stew Peters Show on Friday.

She said that as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, her team was seeking an emergency injunction to prevent the certification of Biden's win.

"We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use under the Electoral Act provisions that simply don't jive with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution," she said. "And Justice Alito was our circuit justice for that."

She added: "Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit, and we were suing the vice president to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral College Act."...

621 chris hayes ID's FF as inevitable final stage of conspir BS, floated by tucker?

OP Congressman: FBI 'participated' in insurrection to 'entrap' harmless protestors and 'frame the MAGA movement'

David Badash June 18, 2021

clearly a job for Space Force!

gOP congressman asks if US Forest Service can 'change the course of the moon's orbit' to fix climate change

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

June 09, 2021

The good news is a Republican U.S. Congressman appears to believe climate change is real and can be fixed. The bad news is he thinks the federal government can somehow alter the orbit of the moon – or the earth

no lnx

new inauguration date is set': Inside the latest QAnon conspiracy theory to 'reinstate' Trump

Zachary Petrizzo Salon June 02, 2021

Hundreds of people gathered in Texas for a QAnon-sponsored conference over Memorial Day weekend to hear the biggest boosters of Donald Trump's Big Lie downplay the Capitol riot and bandy about new threats of a coming coup.

Key Trump allies, including Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Allen West; and perhaps most notably Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., attended the three-day event, dubbed "For God & Country Patriot Roundup," at the Omni Hotel in Dallas.

The QAnon conference came amid reports that Trump is attempting to orchestrate another election coup from his far-off kingdom at Mar-a-Lago. According to a Tuesday tweet from the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, the former President has been telling a number of people he's in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August." Trump's reported thinking echoes that of his former lawyer's, Sidney Powell. On Saturday, Powell told attendees to the QAnon conference that Trump "can simply be reinstated."

"A new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in," she explained. "I'm sure there's not going to be credit for time lost, unfortunately, because the Constitution itself sets the date for inauguration, but he should definitely get the remainder of his term and make the best of it."

Powell was not the only speaker at this past weekend's event who spoke directly about the possibility Trump could reclaim his throne soon.

Michael Flynn, apparently looking to encourage another election coup, asking the crowd why "what happened in Myanmar" can't happen in the U.S?

"No reason," Flynn answered. "I mean, it should happen here."

Flynn's comments drew widespread scorn but during his speech on Saturday, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert promulgated a number of baseless conspiracies about the Capitol riot, claiming that "there's no evidence" that the event constituted "an armed insurrection."

Although "armed" in legal terms extends beyond that of just firearms, police nevertheless found a number of guns on rioters in the aftermath of the insurrection. Furthermore, CNN reported that the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia, were planning on trafficking a number of guns across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. in an effort to support the insurgency.

During his speech, Gohmert also criticized his Democratic colleagues' push to assemble a commission to investigate the riot – an effort that was effectively killed with a filibuster last week by Senate Republicans. Back in January, Gohmert baselessly accused Black Lives Matter and antifa of infiltrating the Capitol riot. Over the weekend, the representative appeared to double down on this theory, claiming that "it wasn't just right-wing extremists" who were involved. Allegations of left-wing agitation and infiltration have been routinely debunked.

The Texas lawmaker also accused the FBI of "unfairly" targeting Trump supporters in their federal probe into the riot. "Where is the outrage about young people being unfairly treated?" he rambled. "Joe Biden's Justice Department is criminalizing political protest." Gohmert later echoed on CNN: "Any violence should not be downplayed. But people who are not engaged in violence should not be charged with crime."

Following his speech, Gohmert posed and took a picture with known QAnon conspiracy theorist and podcaster RedPill78, who openly admitted to storming the Capitol building on January 6.

Around the time of the riot, Gohmert distinguished himself as a loyal Trump booster, spreading the baseless conspiracy theory of systematic fraud at the ballots in the 2020 general election. Back in January, Gohmert filed a lawsuit on Trump's behalf, arguing that a judge should be compelled to tell former Vice President Mike Pence that he had the right to overturn the electoral college votes in President Joe Biden's favor. (Pence in fact did not have this right.) The suit was dismissed twelve hours after its filing.

Many have speculated that Trump is attempting to overturn the election by cheerleading fallacious election audits in various GOP-led states, the largest of which has now dragged on for months now in Maricopa County, Arizona with no end in sight.

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