Gohmert Not Doing Well In Race For Attorney General

 I have several times in this blog referred to Louie Gohmert (pictured) as the dumbest person in the United States Congress. It looks like someone else will now have to fill that dubious honor.

Louie Gohmert is not running for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead, he is running for Texas Attorney General -- hoping to unseat the ethically-challenged incumbent (Ken Paxton).

But Gohmert is not doing well in his race for Attorney General. In a poll taken between January 18th and 25 (Dallas Morning News / UT-Tyler Poll), he is trailing badly. He has only 8% to George P. Bush's 19% and Paxton's 33%.

There were still 33% undecided, but it looks unlikely they will gravitate to Gohmert now that primary voting has started.

Texas is the big winner with Gohmert out of office.

The "Triple Crown" Of Crazy In The House of Representatives

Who is the craziest person voters have sent to the U.S. House of Representatives? Early on in the current Congress, one might have thought it was clearly Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). But there are a couple of others that want to wrest the crown for crazy away from her -- Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia).

Here, from his column in The Washington Post, is how Dana Milbank sees this horse race for the crazy crown:

It’s a real horse race to determine who will be the looniest House Republican of 2021. 

Much as in real horse racing, there will be no Triple Crown winner this year. Medina Spirit won the Kentucky Derby, but the victory was marred by evidence of doping, and Medina Spirit then lost the Preakness to Rombauer. Rombauer’s reign was brief, falling to Essential Quality at the Belmont.

In the House of Representatives’ crazy stakes, likewise, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) made an early Run for the Roses with talk of Jewish “space lasers,” stalking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-N.Y.), and claiming that mask mandates are tantamount to the Holocaust. But Greene fell back into the crazy pack after Churchill Downs, and, in a surprise development, Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a perennial also-ran, took top honors at Pimlico by calling the Jan. 6 insurrection a nothingburger and by attending a QAnon conference at which the violent overthrow of the U.S. government was discussed.

But the final leg of crazytown’s Triple Crown has just gone to a dark horse, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde. The first-term Georgia Republican put himself on the map with his notion that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol “was a normal tourist visit.” And now, with an assist from Gohmert and from former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli (a crazy horse long ago put to pasture), Clyde has filed a federal lawsuit on a matter of the most pressing constitutional importance.

“This is a direct assault on a foundational legal principle of our republic and it should cause great alarm in all of us,” Clyde, wearing a tie clip in the shape of an automatic weapon, announced to reporters outside the Capitol Monday.

Furlongs of grave allegations raced from his lips. “Unconstitutional!” “Authoritarian conduct!” “An active ongoing attack on our democracy!”

What existential threat to our country had Clyde uncovered? The Chinese? The Russians? The Proud Boys?

No. Clyde is mad about magnetometers.

Since the insurrection, he and all 434 of his colleagues have been required to walk through metal detectors to get to the House floor. Clyde, a former gun shop owner (in which capacity he fought the IRS), is along with Gohmert one of a small few who have refused to cooperate with the Capitol Police’s efforts to keep guns out of the chamber. His refusal cost him $15,000 in fines.

Now, Clyde is suing because he wants “to do everything within my power to expose House Resolution 73 [the magnetometer rule] for the danger it poses to our Republic.” Apparently, the danger it poses is mostly to Clyde and Gohmert. . . .

With logic on par with 20th-century political scientist Bluto, a.k.a. John Belushi (“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”), Clyde complained to reporters Wednesday that the House Ethics Committee, which isn’t a court of law, failed to give him his day in court.

“A person cannot be fined and have their salary forcibly taken away without due process of law,” Clyde proclaimed. “In any normal court, anything else than a unanimous verdict would be cause of a mistrial or a hung jury and no fine would be levied.”

Clyde was baffled by the bipartisan ethics committee’s practice of requiring majority agreement to uphold a member’s appeal. “In baseball, a tie goes to the runner,” Clyde reasoned.

The committee also isn’t a baseball league.

Gohmert, trying to keep pace with Clyde, howled: “You have a formula for a third-world theocracy, oligarchy. This is insane!” He said the courts must act “before the Constitution is completely obliterated by the speaker.”. . .

I asked Clyde and Gohmert who was paying Cooch. Turns out the Republican Party is bankrolling the lawsuit, and the fees are “between attorney and client privilege,” Clyde professed.

So the lawmakers used federal property to announce a Republican Party lawsuit that should cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to redress $20,000 in fines? Now that is some thoroughbred crazy.

Gohmert Sues VP Pence In Attempt To Keep trump In Office

 On this blog, I have called Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) "the stupidest man in Congress" many times. It looks like Gohmert wants to prove that is true. He has now sued the vice-president of his own party in an effort to make him violate the rules and declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election when Congress meets next week.

Here's part of how Kyle Cheney reports Gohmert's crazy lawsuit at Politico.com:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump's defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress' counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with leading the Jan. 6 session of the House and Senate — to simply ignore President-elect Joe Biden's electors and count Trump's losing slates instead.

The lawsuit asserts that the 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act, the vague statute that has long governed the electoral vote counting process with minimal drama, unconstitutionally binds Pence from exercising total authority to choose which votes to count.

"Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted," the suit contends.

The lawsuit comes before Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It's unclear if he'll grant the request for an expedited judgment.

Though the lawsuit itself is unlikely to gain legal traction, it does put Pence in the position of having to either contest the suit — putting him on the opposite side of Trump and his GOP defenders — or support it and lay bare the intention to subvert the will over the voters in the 2020 election.

Gohmert Falls Short Of Speaker's Job -- By 202 Votes

Yesterday I posted about Louie Gohmert's quixotic and rather ridiculous attempt to be elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. Today I have the sad (not really) duty to inform you that crazy Louie has fallen short of that goal -- 202 votes short (out of the 205 votes needed to be elected). Louie got 3 votes, and one of those was his own vote.

The other two GOP representatives who cast a dubious vote for Louie were Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma and Randy Weber of Texas. The voters in Oklahoma's 1st Congressional District and Texas's 14th Congressional District should think long and hard about re-electing these two in 2016. Their belief that Louie Gohmert has the intelligence, skill, and leadership potential to be Speaker of the House shows their link to reality to be tenuous at best.

But Louie's huge defeat doesn't mean the country dodged a bullet. That's because the clearly incompetent John Boehner got 216 Republican votes -- enough to re-elect him to the Speaker position.

(The image above is from the Facebook page of the Democratic Party.)

A Bit Of (Unintended) Humor To Brighten Your Day

(This cartoon image of Louie Gohmert is by Matt Wuerker at Politico.com.)

If you are like me, the thought of Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress has put you in a depressing tailspin -- so I thought we could all use a little humor. And the craziest man in Congress, the man who never passes up an opportunity to say something stupid for the cameras, the man who makes other extremist Republicans nervous when he opens his mouth, has provided it for us.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) has announced his candidacy for Speaker of the House, and he has even created a web page to promote his candidacy. I provided a link to that web page just in case you think that couldn't possibly be true. To Gohmert, John Boehner is a flaming liberal, and he even had the temerity to call him a "dictator". Saying as many as 30% of congressional Republicans could bolt from the GOP if Boehner is not ousted, Gohmert told Fox News:

“They are so fed up that we are not fighting for what we said, and if we don’t show them that, it’s going to devastate this country.” 

Gohmert says he doesn't expect to be elected on the first ballot, but believes the party will turn to him for "leadership" after three or four rounds of voting.

Those of us who live in the world of reality have long suspected that Gohmert lives in a dream world of his own making -- a world where facts don't matter and nothing is too insane to be uttered by a public official. If you doubt that, then peruse these examples of Gohmert's rhetoric:

(On the IRS)
"We can put Obama on the defensive just by completely getting rid of the Internal Revenue code." 

(On terror babies)
"[The children] could be raised and coddled as future terrorists [and] twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life."

(On muslims in the Obama administration)
 "This administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America."

(On the oil pipeline)
"So when [caribou] want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. ... So my real concern now [is] if oil stops running through the pipeline ... do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?"

(On the shooting in Aurora, Colorado)
"You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place. ... We've threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God's name, they're going to be jailed ... I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don't want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."

(On cutting food stamps)
"It's not evil to cut food stamps. Some poor people are obese, so this will help them."

(On same-sex marriage)
"The problem is. . .when you say it's not a man and a woman anymore, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?"

(On the Attorney General testifying before a House committee)
"I cannot have a witness challenge my character! The Attorney General will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!"

Now I don't expect Louie Gohmert has a snowball's chance of surviving the Sahara Desert in the summer to be elected Speaker, but I find the idea of it very humorous -- and it shows that he still has no connection to the real world.