Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) strained to try to explain the deficit, correctly noting that most of it came from reckless spending during the Bush administration era. Exhibiting his partisan colors, Broun tried to reconcile Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program by falsely claiming that Bush administration Treasury Secretary was a “Democrat”:

BROUN: I wanted to put some perspective on 2008, too. That’s when the President’s chief economic adviser — I guess the Treasury Secretary — told him that the sky was falling and that we needed to pass the Toxic Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which many Republicans voted against. I didn’t buy the Democratic Treasury Secretary under a Republican President because that’s exactly what Hank Paulson is. He’s a Wall Street insider, a Wall Street banker. Wall Street believes in big government.

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Paulson is a Republican, and was still a Republican when TARP was passed. Broun’s fib is the latest in a long line of conservatives desperately flailing to make up excuses for the Republican-led bank bailout. Glenn Beck, who supported the bank bailout when it was passed, now says he “hated” Bush for enacting the bailout. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who suspended his campaign to go to Washington and negotiate the bailout, says he was misled in voting for it, claiming now that he did not know that it was intended to help financial institutions.

In a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) revealed that he refused to answer all the questions on the Census form and sent it back incomplete:

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Athens), who carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, declared how many human beings lived in his household — and then sealed the envelope.

The congressman refused to answer questions about the sex and age of occupants, ancestry, or whether he lives in a rental or owns. “That’s none of their business,” Broun said in a recent phone interview.

“The Constitution requires the federal government to count the number of people in this country every 10 years,” the congressman said. “It doesn’t require them to ask a lot of personal information. People are very concerned about an invasion of privacy, and I have those same concerns.”

What Congressman Broun did is illegal. U.S. law says that people can be fined for refusing to honestly fill out the entire Census:

§ 221. Refusal or neglect to answer questions; false answers

(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not more than $100.

(b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a) of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500.

It doesn’t seem that the Census Bureau aggressively enforces these fines. Reps. Michele Bachmann (MN) and Ron Paul (TX) have also said that they would be answering only how many people live in their household. Luckily, it doesn’t seem that many people are taking the conservatives’ advice so far. Census director Robert Groves said that so far, he hasn’t seen any evidence of a large-scale boycott of the Census; just “1 or 2 percent of the 10-question forms returned so far have been incomplete.” (HT: Ben Smith)

As the vote on health care approaches, Republican lawmakers are attacking the legislation with increasingly bizarre and hateful comments. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), a far right lawmaker who has led much of the opposition to health reform, took to the floor of the House of Representatives last night to deliver a diatribe against health reform. Previously, Broun had compared President Obama to a dictator who would impose martial law. But last night, Broun out-performed his reactionary colleagues and even his own track record of absurdity. Bellowing into the microphone, Broun said that “if ObamaCare passes,” a “free insurance card” (which is not in the bill) will be “as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the “Great War of Yankee Aggression“:

BROUN: If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

Watch it:

Rather than simply distort the legislation by lying about how much it costs or how it will affect people, the right has tried to build opposition to health reform using racial, militant rhetoric. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) compared health reform to a Japanese suicide bombing attack. And Glenn Beck has continuously referred to health reform as “reparations” for slavery. But Broun’s analogy between health reform and a “Great War of Yankee Aggression” might take the cake for its coded racism, historical revisionism, and outright level of detachment from reality. (HT: Media Matters Action Network)

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) has declared himself to to be one of Obama’s nuttiest critics, suggesting that that the President has a plan to rule as a dictator and impose “martial law.” During an interview with radio host Pete Dominick yesterday, Broun questioned whether Obama is even a legitimate President, saying he “doesn’t know” if Obama is an American citizen:

DOMINICK: You think he’s an American citizen and a Christian?

BROUN: I’m not gonna get involved in that.

DOMINICK: You can’t say that he’s an American citizen?

BROUN: Well —

DOMINICK: You can’t say the president’s an American citizen?

BROUN: I don’t know.

Watch it:

Broun’s apparent endorsement of birtherism is far from his only radical tendency. He has in the past proposed privatizing Medicare, referred to global warming as a “hoax,” and told an uninsured constituent who has major depression that the solution to the health care crisis is for people like him to go to the emergency room.

At a town hall last week, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) continued his campaign to inject over the top, paranoid rhetoric into America’s political discourse. “I’m chairman of the Second Amendment Task Force fighting for Second Amendment rights. Those gun rights are actually critical to prevent treason in America,” said Broun, according to Athens Banner-Herald reporter Blake Aued, who provided a transcript of Broun’s remarks to TPM. Broun then said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one of the “domestic enemies of the Constitution” that he says he swore to defend against:

I’ve gotten to be good friends with Justice Antonin Scalia, who he and Justice Clarence Thomas are the only ones who have any concept of what the Constitution is supposed to be and, and do what they’re supposed to do as justices by upholding the Constitution. But, in fact every, when I was sworn into the Marine Corp, I was sworn to uphold the Constitution against every enemy, foreign and domestic. We’ve got a lot of domestic enemies of the Constitution (applause) and one of those sits in the speaker’s chair of the United States Congress, Nancy Pelosi.

Previously, Broun has said that President Obama wants to go “down the road” of Hitler and has the pieces in place to “establish an authoritarian government.” He has also said that Obama, Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are part of a “socialist elite” that wants to declare martial law in America.

One of the most radical opponents of health care reform is Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). He has said that a public option would “kill people.” Last Tuesday, Broun was confronted by a constituent at a health care town hall who explained that he has has gone into debt because he can’t afford insurance for his major depressive disorder. In response to his constituent’s story, Broun said that “people who have depression, who have chronic diseases in this country…can always get care in this country by going to the emergency room.” That comment prompted boos from the crowd. Towards the end of Broun’s answer, a constituent yelled, “That’s why we need a public option!” which brought cheers from the audience. Watch it:

As Georgia Liberal explains, “Treating major depression is not a one-shot deal. That is like saying cancer patients should get treatment one night in the E.R. and it is all better. You cannot treat chronic conditions in the ER.”

During the floor debate this morning over the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) received a round of applause from GOP colleagues when he claimed that man-made global warming is a “hoax” with “no scientific consensus.” Broun, citing misleading statistics, also claimed that the bill would hurt the poor and “kill jobs:”

BROUN: Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus. … And who’s going to be hurt most [by ACES] the poor, the people on limited income…the people who can least afford to have their energy taxes raised by MIT says $3100 per family. … This bill must be defeated. We need to be good stewards of our environment, but this is not it, it’s a hoax! … [APPLAUSE.]

Watch it:

Broun’s tired hoax claims aside, Broun’s $3,100 talking point is contradicted by the Congressional Budget Office, which found that that the average cost of the legislation would be only 48-cents a day, the price of a postage stamp, and that “households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020.” A report by the Center for American Progress and the University of Massachusetts also found that the bill would create 1.7 million new jobs, including 59,000 new jobs in Broun’s homestate of Georgia.

- Ben Bergmann

Yesterday, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and talked about the outbreak of the H1N1 virus. When discussing the first death in the United States from the disease, Broun used the tragedy to rail against “illegal aliens”:

Q: What do you think happens next here? Or should happen?

BROUN: Of course, it’s sad to see a 23-month-old child die from this disease. We don’t have any specifics. I tried to find out this morning specifics about this child that has died — whether it was someone who is from Mexico, possibly an illegal alien who has been brought into this country.

One big problem we have in this country is an open border. The border is like a sieve, and so these illegal aliens are coming across, and I think a lot of the health care facilities throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California are going to be overwhelmed by cases coming out of Mexico — Mexican citizens — putting a further strain on those facilities. So, I don’t know if this child was a Mexican, or if it was an American child — what the situation is — but it was sad that this child died.

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In fact, the child was a Mexican citizen whose family was visiting relatives in the United States. “The family had traveled to South Texas. The child became ill and they transported the child to Houston for medical care,” said a Houston health department official. This case had absolutely nothing to do with undocumented immigration. Most of the U.S. cases are arising in people who legally traveled to Mexico for various reasons.

Media Matters and CAP’s Eric Alterman have also documented right-wing media figures blaming Mexican immigrants for the spread of the virus. On April 24, hate radio host Michael Savage said, “Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico,” and on April 27, Neal Boortz asked, “[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans?”

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