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Stories tagged with “Louie Gohmert”

Security

House Passes Republican Amendment Backing Indefinite Detention For Terror Suspects On U.S. Soil

By Eli Clifton on May 18, 2012 at 11:06 am

Protesters in Minneapolis oppose the current NDAA

The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Amash slammed the all-Republican sponsored amendment as doing nothing but providing political cover for House Republicans who disingenuously claim to care about civil liberties, telling his House colleagues last night:

The first part of the amendment does nothing. In other words, if you have constitutional rights, then you have constitutional rights.

While the battle in Congress over the detention provisions in the NDAA may have come to an end with the defeat of the Smith-Nash amendment and the passage of the competing Republican amendment, legal and political challenges may await the NDAA in the very near future.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary injunction, finding that the detainee provisions in the current NDAA are unconstitutional.

And the White House, in a statement [PDF] released on Tuesday evening, listed a series of objections with the pending NDAA including: restrictions on the implementation of the New START treaty; limits on reductions for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal; and new restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees. Moreover, the White House objected to the overall size of the bill, which surpasses President Obama’s request by $3.7 billion and exceeds the Budget Control Act spending caps by $8 billion, and threatened to veto the NDAA if sent to the President in its current form.

NEWS FLASH

Rep. Gohmert On Romney: ‘I’m Not As Excited As I Am Desperate’ | At a meeting between media and conservative legislators today, Tea Party firebrand Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) shared his opinions on Mitt Romney, his party’s presumed presidential nominee. Gohmert is a bit apathetic, if not outright disdainful. According to Dave Weigel at Slate, Gohmert said of Romney, “whether you’re liberal, or whether you’re very conservative, you ought to be excited, because he’s been on your side at one time or another.” Realizing that the reference to Romney’s prodigious flip flopping may be problematic, Gohmert tried to smooth things over. “So I’m not completely understood,” he said. “I’m not as excited as I am desperate.”

NEWS FLASH

Gohmert: Republican Presidential Candidate Should ‘Absolutely’ Repeal Romneycare | Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that the GOP presidential candidate should repeal Mitt Romney’s signature health care reform plan in Massachusetts just moments after he addressed a Tea Party crowd on the steps of the Supreme Court. During a brief interview with ThinkProgress, Gohmert explained that he was “embarrassed that [Romney] felt like even a state can do a mandate like that.” Asked if the party’s challenger to Barack Obama should work to repeal it, the Congressman added, “[I] absolutely do, I absolutely do.” Watch it:

Special Topic

Gohmert: Americans Will ‘Die’ If The Affordable Care Act Remains In Place

By Igor Volsky on Mar 27, 2012 at 12:03 pm

As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert (R) addressed a Tea Party rally calling for its repeal. In a short interview following his remarks, Gohmert told ThinkProgress that Americans will “die early” if the law remains in place and the Court finds it constitutional:

VOLSKY: Congressman, do you think because of health care that people will live shorter lives — that it will shorten the lives of Americans?

GOHMERT: Those are the indications. [...] [This law] would make us like England and Canada where they try to come to America to get the treatment because they don’t want to die.

Watch it:

Gohmert’s rhetoric closely resembles the “sky is falling” hysteria surrounding the measure as it made its way through Congress in 2009 and 2010. Gohmert himself warned, “I would hate to think that among five women, one of ‘em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.” But in the two years since its enactment, none of the GOP’s dire predictions have come to pass.

LGBT

Rep. Gohmert: Ninth Circuit ‘Not Smart Enough’ To Bring Egg And Sperm Together

By Zack Ford on Feb 8, 2012 at 3:46 pm

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) used a House floor speech to offer a particularly disturbing reaction to yesterday’s ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. In it, he suggested that marriage is about “the idea of an egg and a sperm coming together” and called the judges “not smart enough to figure out actual plumbing”:

GOHMERT: Nature seemed to like the idea of an egg and a sperm coming together because of pro-creation. Apparently [the judges] thought the sperm had far better use some other way biologically, combining it with something else. But the voters of Iowa came back and said you know what, if you’re not smart enough to figure out actual plumbing…then perhaps we need new judges, and that’s what they did.

Watch a clip:

What the judges actually found was that Proposition 8 had nothing to do with procreation, because it didn’t impact whether same-sex couples in California could raise children.

Politics

Rep. Gohmert Calls Obama’s Jobs Plan An Assault On Marriage That Encourages Divorce

By Marie Diamond on Oct 5, 2011 at 1:53 pm

“This is not a jobs bill, this is a government takeover,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) proclaimed on the House floor yesterday during his long-winded denunciation of President Obama’s proposed American Jobs Act. While most Republicans have limited themselves to denouncing the bill as a wasteful tax-and-spend measure that’s “class warfare” on millionaires, Gohmert found some more creative grounds for his attack.

Gohmert contemptuously pointed to tax deductions for single parents and unmarried couples as proof that the bill is actually a stealth assault on traditional marriage. The so-called jobs bill, he charged, actually encourages divorce and may even be secretly advancing a pro-gay agenda:

GOHMERT: This may be something nice he’s throwing out for gay folks that are living together so he can tell them actually you’re better off not getting married, because there’s a marriage penalty here…If you’re the head of a single household, you have an exemptions at $225,000. All other cases $200,000. So it really penalizes married individuals…But if you want to get divorced it is good news for you…the good news if you’re thinking about divorce is you can actually get divorced and have $75,000 to $100,000 higher exception. And you can even live together! This is the president’s proposal — live together and you get a higher exception than if you’re married. Now of course the founders — they all understood marriage to be between a man and a woman. [...] This president…takes a shot at traditional, conventional marriage.

Watch it:

Giving single parents and unmarried couples a similar tax exemption as married couples is not, of course, an assault on marriage, but an attempt to level the playing field. President Obama has, in fact, kept his promise to end marriage penalties in the tax code, in addition to extending child tax credits. Clearly, his aim is to use the tax code to help all families, married or not.

Married couples filing tax returns together have typically gotten a far greater financial benefit than people filing individually, but Gohmert has no problem with the government essentially incentiving marriage with economic inducements. Yet he thinks that giving other Americans the same exemptions is somehow encouraging immorality because people can live together without getting married. Is Gohmert concerned that the institution of marriage will unravel if there’s no longer a government kickback for walking down the aisle?

Health

Rep. Louie Gohmert Warns Supreme Court Justices: ‘Any President’ Could Access Your Health Records Under Reform

By Igor Volsky on Oct 5, 2011 at 11:29 am

A group of Republican senators and representatives convened on the Senate Swamp this morning to present 1.6 million petition signatures “from American citizens who are urging Congress to immediately repeal Obamacare.” The lawmakers argued that health care reform has undermined job creation and pledged to repeal the law before the Supreme Court rules on its constitutionality in the summer of 2012.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) went a step further, suggesting that the justices should find the law unconstitutional in order to protect their own medical privacy:

GOHMERT: If the Supreme Court is really weighing from a personal standpoint, ‘gee do we strike it down or not?’ There is good news for them. In the Obamacre bill, any president they don’t like will have access to any Justice’s health care records and as I understand — I haven’t read the agreement between the administration and GE — GE will have access to their health care records. So a good not for the Supreme Court, all of their medical records will be available to the people they don’t like in the federal government. Good news for them if they don’t strike it down.

Watch it:

It’s unclear which provision Gohmert is referring to, but some Republicans have recently raised concerns about a regulation that would require insurers to send patient information to the government. The rule — which is not yet finalized — is the result of a provision in the law that establishes a “risk adjustment” mechanism to compensate insurers who take on too many sick patients. HHS is currently soliciting comments from the health care industry and the general public about how best to bolster patient confidentiality, but the Affordable Care Act specifically prevents the president or anyone else from obtaining personal medical information. The law requires HHS to obtain “de-identified claims” that would that could not be attributed to individual patients.

Economy

GOP Rep Introduces ‘Jobs’ Bill That Would Completely Eliminate Corporate Taxes

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Sep 14, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Taking the GOP’s anti-tax ideology to its logical conclusion, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) introduced today his own “American Jobs Act” — giving his bill the same name as President Obama’s plan — which would completely eliminate corporate income taxes. Gohmert claims this will create jobs:

It is a very simple bill, which will eliminate the corporate tax which serves as a tariff that our American companies pay on goods they produce here in America. This bill will actually create jobs in America

The two-page bill changes the tax code to replace any mention of the current “35 percent” tax rate with “0 percent.” Corporations are already sitting on trillions in cash, so cutting their taxes would likely do very little to help the economy, but would balloon the deficit by depriving the government of about $300 billions in revenues annually. As the CBO found, cutting taxes on businesses “typically does not create an incentive for them to spend more on labor or to produce more, because production depends on the ability to sell output.”

But Gohmert’s plan is even more irksome considering that he’s spent the last few days attacking Obama’s jobs plan because it would prohibit employers from discriminating against people who have been unemployed. Gohmert appeared on various conservative media outlets to expose this “devilish detail,” saying on Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday, via Political Correction:

GOHMERT: We have created in this bill a newly protected class, not on race, creed, color, sex — not even sexual orientation, this is a new one. It’s not religion, it’s a prohibition of discrimination in employment on the basis of an individual’s status as unemployed. By golly, if you apply for a job and you’re unemployed and you feel like you got discriminated against and not hired because you were unemployed, see a lawyer. You’ve got a claim under this bill.

So Gohmert wants to help unemployed Americans get jobs by eliminating taxes for corporations, but thinks helping those jobless directly is “devilish.” But at least his plan isn’t as half-baked as his colleagues’ plan to create jobs by curbing regulations on snakes.

Politics

Rep. Louie Gohmert Wonders If Obama Chose Debt Ceiling Deadline To Coincide With His Birthday Party

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jul 18, 2011 at 11:15 am

While a startling number of House Republicans refuse to accept experts’ dires warnings about the possibility of default come Aug. 2 if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks he has stumbled across the Obama administration’s real motivation behind choosing that date. Many Republicans think the August date is a phony deadline Democrats invented to scare Congress into raising the ceiling, but Gohmert sees a more personal significance for President Obama — his 50th birthday on Aug. 4 and his birthday party on the 3rd.

The fact that the party is the day after the debt deadline is something Gohmert finds awfully suspicious, he told Newsmax TV yesterday, suggesting that Obama chose the date so he could be a hero at his “birthday bash” for the “celebrities flying in from all over”:

GOHMERT: And I can’t help but be a little bit cynical here. Because we find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over. And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration. [...] Isn’t that amazing? The timing of this?

Watch it:

It’s probably safe to assume that nobody’s birthday factored into the Treasury Department’s calculation of the deadline, as it was determined by projections of revenues and expenditures after the U.S. officially hit its debt limit in May. Even House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed Aug. 2 is the drop dead date for raising the debt ceiling. But the fact that Gohmert would even dream up a scenario in which a politician would let his birthday play a significant role in serious policy-making perhaps says more about him than anything else.

Economy

Boehner Agrees With Obama That Social Security Checks May Not Go Out If The Debt Ceiling Isn’t Raised

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 15, 2011 at 9:35 am

Earlier this week, President Obama warned that he “cannot guarantee” that Social Security checks will go out on schedule on Aug. 3 if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2. As a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center laid out, “the government likely would not have enough revenue to pay the full $23 billion payment to Social Security recipients due on Aug. 3″ were the debt ceiling not raised, because of the high amount of Social Security payments that are due that day.

Two days ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) criticized Obama for employing this rhetoric. “We were all shocked and appalled that President Obama dangled out in front of the cameras that senior citizens may not get their checks. That is a very dangerous statement to make,” Bachmann said, calling on the President to “tell the truth.”

Republicans have put forth the theory that Social Security is not subject to debt ceiling limitations because it is financed by payroll taxes. But it seems like Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) agrees with Obama, and not his GOP colleagues, on this one. During an interview last night with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, Boehner agreed that if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, Social Security is one of the programs that is on the chopping block:

VAN SUSTEREN: Congresswoman Bachmann talked to me last night about Social Security, because that wa one of the things the President said, said something about, come August 2nd, you know, maybe the checks won’t go out. Does the money from the Social Security come from a different account essentially, so that even if we do hit the debt ceiling and there is still some government shutdown, those checks still go out because the revenue from them is from people working?

BOEHNER: Ohhh, I don’t believe so. At the end of the day, it all comes out of the general fund, and the general fund is expected to be out of cash come August 3rd or August 4th, and then the Treasury Secretary would have to make decisions on what to pay and what not to pay.

Watch it:

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) this week called on Obama to “quit lying” about Social Security. “You know darn well that if Aug. 2, comes and goes there is plenty of money to pay off our debt and cover all Social Security obligations,” Walsh said. Maybe Boehner should drop him a line.

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