gohmert 2 4%

1/20 capt

no cure for stupid? poster for?

no merri

TRUMP COUP 12TH AMEND LAWSUIT KARI

wacko node, crazy tag

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?

The legislation does name several individual officers, including Goodman, for their valor, saying “Capitol Police Officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, Metropolitan Police Department Officer Jeffrey Smith, and those who sustained injuries, and the courage of Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, exemplify the patriotism and the commitment of Capitol Police officers, and those of other law enforcement agencies, to risk their lives in service of our country.”

The 21 Republicans who voted against the bill are:

Lauren Boebert of Colorado
John Rose of Tennessee
Andy Harris of Maryland
Thomas Massie of Kentucky
Bob Good of Virginia
Louie Gohmert of Texas
Barry Moore of Alabama
Ralph Norman of South Carolina
Matt Rosendale of Montana
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
Chip Roy of Texas
Paul Gosar of Arizona
Andy Biggs of Arizona
Warren Davidson of Ohio
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania
Matt Gaetz of Florida
Greg Steube of Florida
Andrew Clyde of Georgia
Jody Hice of Georgia
Mary Miller of Illinois
Michael Cloud of Texas

Further information: 2022 Texas Attorney General election

In November 2021, Gohmert announced his candidacy in the 2022 Texas Attorney General election instead of seeking re-election in Texas's 1st congressional district, to challenge incumbent Ken Paxton in a crowded Republican primary. He made the announcement to run after saying he would join the race if he could reach $1 million in political donations in 10 days. He stated he had reached the goal;^[141] however, campaign finance report show Gohmert had not met the $1 million goal.^[142] Gohmert ended last in the four-candidate primary.^[143]

===

several connections link Texas Representative Louie Gohmert to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Here's how Gohmert is associated with QAnon:

Participation in QAnon-affiliated events: Gohmert spoke at the "For God & Country Patriot Roundup" conference in Dallas, an event organized by a prominent QAnon influencer.
Presence of QAnon symbols: The QAnon slogan "Where we go one, we go all" was displayed behind Gohmert during the event.
Downplaying of the January 6th insurrection: Gohmert's speech downplayed the seriousness of the Capitol riot.
Vote against a resolution condemning QAnon: Gohmert voted against a House resolution condemning the QAnon movement in 2020.

Despite Gohmert's claims of unfamiliarity with QAnon's core tenets, his participation in QAnon-affiliated events and his vote against condemning the conspiracy theory have led to his association with the movement

ggl 6 25

[### Allen West, Sid Miller and Louie Gohmert attend QAnon- ...

_The Texas Tribune_

https://www.texastribune.org › 2021/06/01 › texas-allen...](https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/01/texas-allen-west-sid-miller-louie-gohmert-qanon/)

Jun 1, 2021 — Texas officials speak at QAnon-affiliated event where Trump adviser Michael Flynn encouraged military coup on U.S. government. Texas GOP ...

[### Louie Gohmert leaves Congress having passed one law ...

The Texas Tribune

https://www.texastribune.org › 2022/08/18 › louie-goh...](https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/louie-gohmert-texas-congress/)

Aug 18, 2022 — Gohmert was a precursor to former President Donald Trump's brand of populist, establishment-bucking conservatism that delights in offending ...

[### At Texas event with QAnon ties, Louie Gohmert downplays ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › ... › Morning Mix](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/01/louie-gohmert-qanon-texas-insurrection/)

Jun 1, 2021 — With the QAnon slogan shining onstage behind him, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) spoke to a crowd gathered for the “For God & Country Patriot ...

[### Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert downplayed the Capitol riot at a ...

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › republican-rep-louie-...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-rep-louie-gohmert-downplayed-010108854.html)

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert downplayed the Capitol riot at a major QAnon conference and posed for photos with a conspiracy theorist influencer. Eliza Relman.

[### Louie Gohmert Says He Isn't a QAnon Supporter, Just ...

The Daily Beast

https://www.thedailybeast.com › louie-gohmert-says-he-i...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/louie-gohmert-says-he-isnt-a-qanon-supporter-just-a-moron/)

Jun 1, 2021 — Some people spent Memorial Day at parades or BBQing with friends, but not Loonie Louie Gomhert, who was in Dallas speaking at The For God ...

[### During his time at the convention, Gohmert also snapped a photo ...

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com › posts › during-his-time-at-t...](https://www.facebook.com/49345352734/posts/during-his-time-at-the-convention-gohmert-also-snapped-a-photo-with-a-qanon-prom/10157657116717735/)

During his time at the convention, Gohmert also snapped a photo with a QAnon-promoting podcaster who's claimed that he participated in the Capitol riot.

[### Rep. Louie Gohmert And Texas GOP Chair To Speak At ...

Forbes

https://www.forbes.com › Business](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2021/04/08/rep-louie-gohmert-and-texas-gop-chair-to-speak-at-qanon-affiliated-conference/)

Apr 8, 2021 — This article is more than 4 years old. Topline. A sitting congressman and the chair of the Texas Republican Party are among those slated to ...

[### Some Texas Republicans Have Closer QAnon Ties Than ...

Texas Standard

https://www.texasstandard.org › stories › some-texas-rep...](https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/some-texas-republicans-have-closer-qanon-ties-than-you-might-think/)

Jul 8, 2021 — This month, soon-to-be former Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West announced his plans to challenge Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott in next year's ...

[### Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert Suggests Capitol Riot Was a ...

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com › texas-rep-louie-gohmert-s...](https://www.newsweek.com/texas-rep-louie-gohmert-suggests-capitol-riot-was-set-democrats-1608641)

Jul 11, 2021 — "That's what this treatment of people that got arrested was all about – intimidation," the Republican told Dallas CPAC attendees.

[### Michael Flynn Suggests that a Coup Should Happen in ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/flynn-coup-gohmert-qanon.html)

Jun 1, 2021 — At the same event, Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, repeated a widely debunked claim that right-wing extremists were ...

an 5 24

alternet-no lnx

The supreme scheme: How Alito and Thomas are fueling the ongoing Trump coup

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann May 20, 2024

Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, needs to act.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito was just caught red-handed promoting Trump’s fascist “stop the steal” campaign to overthrow the 2020 election and end democracy in America by flying the upside-down flag at his home. He then went on Fox “News” and lied that it was his wife’s fault and that she did it because schoolchildren at a nearby bus stop saw a neighbor’s “F*ck Trump” yard sign.

In fact, as the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend:

“Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the American flag signaling distress. Here’s the problem: there were no school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as a result of the pandemic and didn’t re-open until March 2021.”

READ: America in the final stage of a 40-year transition

But Alito’s fingers were apparently far deeper in the January 6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell pointed out on Stew Peters’ rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th.

It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed:

“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use per the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jibe with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Justice Alito was our circuit court justice for that. 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 Count Act.” (emphasis mine)

The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, is the provision under which a contested election for president gets thrown to Congress, as happened in the 1876 election where Democrat Sam Tilden got more electoral and popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the first count.

That election ended up thrown to the House because three states had submitted two sets of Electoral College votes (just like Trump’s are fake electors), so Congress cut a deal to end Reconstruction in exchange for making Hayes president, even though he arguably lost the election.

The lawsuit, filed by Gohmert, Kari Lake, and a handful of Republican operatives, demanded the delay so Republicans on the Supreme Court could decide who’d be president, just like they did in the 2000 election. It called for:

“[R]espondent Vice President of the United States to refrain from invoking the dispute-resolution provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 … for the duration of this Court’s consideration of a timely filed petition for a writ of certiorari. As set forth in the argument below, the ECA violates the Electors’ Clause, the Twelfth Amendment, and the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty.”

If Alito would rule that Pence must defer to Congress per the 12th Amendment, the election of 2020 would be thrown to the House with each state having one vote. There, the presidency would have gone to Trump 27-23, because 27 states’ congressional delegations were then controlled by Republicans.

This was not a brand-new or hastily organized plan. I wrote on March 13, 2020 — eight months before the election — that Republicans I knew in Washington DC had informed me that the Trump folks were planning this exact strategy.

And, sure enough, here it was, with Sam Alito as the inside man.

The invasion of the House chamber by the “stop the steal” traitors was, by the theory of this plan, supposed to delay the counting of electoral college votes at least for a day, to give Alito time to act on the next day, January 7th. He and the courts would then rule that the 12th amendment took precedent to law made since then, Congress would declare Trump the winner, and that would be the end of the discussion.

But Nancy Pelosi got wind of the plot and blew it up by re-convening Congress at 8 pm to count the votes, just two hours after the last of the rioters had left the building and before Alito could rule. As Trump‘s senior attorney Powell told Peters:

“Nancy Pelosi had finagled to file an amicus brief in it — there had been inside goings on in Congress where I believe it was Steve Scalise and [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy [who] kept her from being an actual party; she wanted to work herself inside the case as a party but somehow that didn’t happen — so she got notice when we made our filing because she’d filed an amicus brief. And then everything broke loose and she really speeded up reconvening Congress to get the vote [count] going, or [Bill Barr’s] Justice [Department] might have issued an injunction to stop it all, which is what should have happened.”

In the end, Alito had to turn down the lawsuit on the morning of January 7th because Congress had already voted to certify the election for Biden.

As a result, we’ll never know how close we came to having a single corrupt Supreme Court justice overturn the election, but that flag flying outside his house gives us a pretty good clue as to what he may well have done the morning of January 7th had Pelosi not quickly acted the previous evening.

But Alito’s attempts to overturn our democracy weren’t limited to his support for Trump’s treasonous acts on January 6th. Were it not for Alito, Clarence Thomas, and at least two other Republicans on the Court, Donald Trump would by now have almost certainly been convicted in federal Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom of seditiously trying to overthrow our government.

That federal criminal case was rapidly moving along when Trump’s lawyers made the absurd assertion that he was immune from prosecution for his attempted sedition because of a brand new, previously unheard of, and totally bizarre, made-up doctrine of presidential immunity. Even Richard Nixon didn’t have the cojones to try that one: he simply admitted his guilt and accepted a pardon to avoid going to prison.

It only takes four members of the Court to grant certiorari, allowing the Court to hear a case: four or more Republicans on the Court went out of their way to give Trump the delay he desperately needed. On February 28th, they granted cert and scheduled oral arguments for the very last day of their 2023-2024 session, the week of April 22nd.

To add insult to the injury to our republic, in oral arguments Alito dropped this little bomb on America, turning the case against Trump inside-out and claiming Trump should get a free pass to crime all he wanted:

“I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is an incumbent?

“All right. Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

“And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

Thankfully, at least for the historical record, the Attorney representing Jack Smith’s Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, immediately replied:

“I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito.”

But Alito, not Dreeben, is on the Court and is the decision-maker. Alito thus gave — and continues to give — Trump a desperately needed further delay by slow-walking his own part of the Court’s decision in the Trump immunity case.

Even if they rule against Trump, which everybody assumed would happen before Alito dropped that rhetorical turd into the proceeding, by giving Donny the delay he wanted, the Republicans on the Court reduced the chance that Trump will ever be held to account for his crimes.

While the Court typically releases their decisions during the summer, they have the option of waiting as long as they want — even until well past the November election date. So, if Trump is elected, he can fire Jack Smith and end the prosecution himself.

And it’s not like Alito and Thomas don’t have a stake in this fight. If Biden is re-elected, by the 2028 election Alito will be 78 and Thomas 80. Insiders have speculated that both would like to retire soon and have their replacements appointed by a Republican president.

And it won’t be the first time a corrupt Republican on the Court threw an election just to insure that body remained in Republican hands. You’ll recall, in 2000 Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband told friends that the reason she voted to stop the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount and make George W. Bush president was simply because she didn’t want Al Gore to choose her replacement.

Arguably the most galling part of this entire pathetic drama is the response of Democrats with subpoena power in the US Senate. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, for example, issued a miserably weak request for Alito to recuse himself from cases having to do with January 6th, rather than demand the man resign and calling a hearing to make it happen.

We all know what would have happened if the shoe was on the other foot.

A Republican-controlled Senate confronting a Democratic Supreme Court appointee accused of corruption would be holding nationally televised public hearings, dragging that justice and his family and intimates before Congress for a grilling, and demanding both prosecution and impeachment.

That’s exactly what happened in the spring of 1969, when Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee — along with a coordinated effort by President Nixon and Republicans in the media — accused the most liberal member of the Court, Abe Fortas, of being corrupt.

This was Nixon’s chance to flip the balance of the Supreme Court, while conservatives across the nation were still angry about the Brown v Board decision.

Fortas had taken a $20,000 payment from a man he’d defended years earlier; the man hadn’t been able to pay at the time, and finally came up with the money a year or so after LBJ put Fortas on the Court. Not exactly a crime, by any measure.

Fortas was also paid a $15,000 advance for a book he wrote, and Republicans alleged his wife had evidence of tax evasion, although it later turned out that charge was entirely manufactured out of thin air. No crimes here, either.

Nonetheless, the complaints about “Supreme Court corruption” and accompanying threats and pressure from Congressional Republicans against Fortas and his wife — and the firestorm in the media stirred up by Republican commentators — was so intense that Fortas resigned on May 14, 1969 just to get the torture to stop.

Consider that when you think about Alito’s wife hanging the upside-down flag, or her close association with hard-core rightwing causes including her alleged involvement in “Operation Higher Court.” Or Ginni Thomas’ involvement with the January 6th coup attempt itself, texting Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” and “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

Keep in mind that in the 2016 election, the singular thing that caused millions of Republicans — who otherwise considered Trump a fraud, con man, and sexual pervert — to vote for him was that Mitch McConnell was holding Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court open.

As Vox reported:

“One in five [2016] voters told CNN in an exit poll that the Supreme Court was one reason they had cast a ballot. Of the voters who said it was the ‘most important factor’ in their decision, 56 percent voted for Trump. According to the Washington Post, 26 percent of all Trump voters polled said that the Supreme Court was the basis of their decision.”

This fall, the corruption of the Supreme Court by corporate, billionaire, and fossil fuel interests should be at the top of Biden’s re-election campaign: polls show a majority of Americans are horrified by it.

Both Thomas — whose bribe-taking in exchange for his votes on Citizens United and other cases is well documented — and his rightwing buddy Sam Alito must resign or face impeachment. If Republicans could pull it off against a totally innocent Abe Fortas back in the day, Democrats should be able to do it now against two guys whose corruption is obvious to everybody.

Democrats in Congress — particularly on the Senate Judiciary Committee — need to grow a damn spine and make it happen.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court's wealth-driven corruption crisis

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

---

gl 6 25

The Texas Tribune

Louie Gohmert leaves Congress having passed one law and spread countless falsehoods

Gohmert, who turned 69 on Thursday, leaves office having defined his 17-year congressional career with conspiracy, conflict and fomenting anger.

.Aug 18, 2022

Rev

Louie Gohmert Introduces Resolution to Ban the Democratic Party: House Floor Speech Transcript

Louie Gohmert: Recognition is properly gone to a great man, John Lewis, colleague who will be sorely missed. He along with the great Dr. Martin Luther Kin.

.Nov 7, 2024

KLTV.com

Louie Gohmert talks Paxton impeachment, 2024 presidential race, plans for future

Former East Texas congressman Louie Gohmert says Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is dividing and destroying the state's Republican party.

.Sep 14, 2023

The Texas Tribune

“It takes time to get stuff done”: New Texas congressman promises results, not rhetoric

“It takes time to get stuff done”: New Texas congressman promises results, not rhetoric. Nathaniel Moran, the former Smith County judge, has...

.Jan 3, 2023

CNN

This House Republican says ‘you can’t even lie to Congress’ if you are a Republican

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert was trying to make the point that the scales of justice are tilted against Republicans these days.

.Jun 6, 2022

The Washington Post

Analysis | Some far-right members are being replaced by traditional conservatives

For almost 18 years, East Texas has sent Rep. Louie Gohmert (R) to Congress with little hesitancy despite a colorful and often controversial...

.May 28, 2022

NBC News

Lunar New Deal: GOP Rep. Gohmert suggests altering moon's orbit to combat climate change

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, suggested at a congressional hearing that climate change could be combatted by altering the orbit of the moon.

.Jun 10, 2021

Tyler Morning Telegraph

Moran cruises to victory in race to fill Gohmert's Congress seat

Nathaniel Moran got the nod to replace longtime Rep. Louie Gohmert in his 1st Congressional District seat, which represents Tyler and Longview...

.Nov 9, 2022

dailysentinel.com

Retired Gohmert remains loved at home, hated by others

In Nacogdoches County, retired Congressman Louie Gohmert is still a star, a sharp contrast to public perception of the Republican from Tyler...

.Jan 31, 2023

NPR

Texas Republican Rep. Gohmert Tests Positive For Coronavirus After Rebuffing Masks

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, who during the pandemic has repeatedly refused to wear a mask in public, tested positive for the coronavirus.

.Jul 29, 2020

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rep-paul-gosar-wants-to-redesignate-cesar-chavez-day-as-national-border-control-day

Rep. Paul Gosar wants to redesignate Cesar Chavez Day as ‘National Border Control Day’

The resolution reflects a priority of the Center for Immigration Studies

Rep. Paul Gosar is fighting a lawsuit from constituents he once blocked on Facebook. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Cal file photol)

By Emily Kopp

:{Posted April 1, 2019

Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar introduced a resolution last week to designate the birthday of Cesar Chavez, March 31st, as “National Border Control Day.”

Many celebrate the birthday of Chavez, the iconic co-founder of the United Farm Workers union born to a Mexican American family, as a day to reflect on the dignity of agricultural workers and the contribution of Latinx immigrants to the United States.

But Gosar argues that Chavez’s legacy stands for something else entirely, according to a statement by the congressman.

“Cesar Chavez’s lifelong work to protect American workers should be echoed and celebrated throughout America,” Gosar said in his statement. “As open border Democrats continue to advocate against securing our southern border, it is critical to remember the damage illegal immigration does to legal American workers.”

The resolution argues that Chavez “recognized that flooding the labor market with people from abroad undermines the unionized American worker,” citing his calls for the boycott of non-unionized farms.

But the resolution has drawn rebuke from people who knew the labor leader as distorting his legacy, the Arizona Republic reported.

“No one championed immigrants earlier and more consistently than Cesar Chavez and the UFW,” longtime spokesman Marc Grossman told the paper. “But he did oppose strike-breaking by anybody, no matter who they were or what they came from, and that’s what the march was about.”

Gosar’s resolution followed a resolution introduced by Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., cosponsored by a few dozen Democrats, to designate March 31 “Cesar Chavez Day,” according to the Congressional Record.

According to a website devoted to the idea of creating National Border Control Day, the resolution reflects a longtime priority by the Center for Immigration Studies, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with ties to the Trump administration. The organization includes a button to donate on the site.

“Despite the appropriation of his name by the anti-borders crowd, Cesar Chavez dedicated much of his life to fighting against illegal immigration, which growers used to suppress the wages of American farm workers,” a spokesman for the nonprofit said in a statement. “Chavez ran an ‘Illegals Campaign’ to identify and report illegal workers, and even sent his own family to patrol the border when he felt Border Patrol wouldn’t do the job.”

While the center describes itself as a think tank with the mission of “research and publication of immigration issues,” it has published misleading reports to support nativist tropes like the idea that immigrants rely on welfare at a greater rate than natives that the conservative Cato Institute characterized as comparing “apples to elephants.”

And while the resolution cheers Chavez’s union for drawing on “nonviolence and mass mobilization to improve the conditions of persecuted and impoverished American workers,” Gosar has rarely voted in favor of the interests of union workers, according to the AFL-CIO.

Arizona Democratic Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva accused Gosar of concern trolling by “attempting to revise history and corrupt the achievements of Cesar Chavez by attempting to paint him as a right-wing anti-immigrant hack,” the Arizona Republic reported.

“In his advocacy efforts to improve the working conditions and economic well-being of the vulnerable men and women who harvest the food for our constituents’ tables, Cesar Chavez is the complete opposite of the Republican Party and their current anti-immigrant, anti-worker views,” Grijalva said in a statement.

The resolution does not mark the first time Gosar has leveraged headline-grabbing tactics to push an anti-immigration stance.

The congressman last year asked Capitol Police and the Department of Justice to “consider checking identification” of everyone attending President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address and “arresting any illegal aliens in attendance.”

At least 27 lawmakers had invited Dreamers protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, to be their guests for the address.

A nearly identical resolution was introduced in the last Congress by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas.

“It seems only appropriate to deem his birthday as ‘National Border Control Day – seeing that Chavez spent his life addressing the harmful effects that illegal migration might have on this country,” Gohmert said in a statement.

But Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., then the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, denounced the effort as “shameful,” according to The Hill.

“Congressman Gohmert has done everything he can to attack the true legacy of César Chávez to weaken unions, undermine labor protections for workers, and derail immigration reform efforts that honor the dignity and contributions of workers and their families,” the congresswoman said in a statement.

---

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," 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 Fundhave 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."

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gop not allowed to lie to fbi, unfair

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

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am fest w/ troll caucus?

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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 GreeneMatt Gaetz Louie GohmertLauren 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.”

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sued VP big lie = coup?

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

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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...

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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?

gOP 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 ...

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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:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

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

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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 hisformer 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.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

QAnon and evangelicals: Republicans baptized in crazy - Alternet.org ›

'An idiocracy based on a digital prophet': QAnon longs for a fascist ... ›

QAnon cultist businessman goes on Newsmax to say 'Trump is ... ›

Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell are still feeding Trump's delusions of overturning the election: NY Times reporter - Alternet.org ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/louie-gohmert-urges-christians-to-pray-that-scotus-will-throw-out-the-election-and-let-the-house-decide/

--===

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]...

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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."

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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 ofGohmert’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 thatextremistswanted to bring the violentprotests 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.”

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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/

stupid mfer

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 FederationAnnual 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?!

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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 demonratsjust 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 agenciesas 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 whichGreg 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 thantwo 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 preacherwho 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 reportedthen:

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 saidat 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, Biggsforced 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 hecalled 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 withthe 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 Biggs Debbie Lesko Louie Gohmert Rep. Louie Gohmert Rep. Matt Gaetz Rep. Steve King Steve King Impeachment Republican 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 (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]:{}:

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(https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Pickles-Testimony.pdf)

(http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/infowars/) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Early_life_and_education)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Early_political_career)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#U.S._House_of_Representatives)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Elections)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Tenure)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Fiscal_policy)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Climate_change_and_the_environment)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Social_policy)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#%22Terror_baby%22_national_security_vulnerability)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Letter_To_Director_of_National_Intelligence)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Robert_Mueller)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Reelection_in_2016)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Committee_assignments)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Caucus_memberships)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Electoral_history)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#Personal_life)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#References)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert#External_links)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Louie_Gohmert&action=edit&section=1&editintro=Template:BLP_editintro)

$5,201,721	$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.

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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

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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.