Since 2005 Louie Gohmert has served Texas’ 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Presently he is also acting vice chair on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
From his position on that subcommittee, Rep. Gohmert has become something of a go-to for Fox News and far-Right media outlets for opinions on immigration and terrorism. Far from offering expert analysis unencumbered by conjecture, Gohmert uses such opportunities to peddle bigotry and conspiracies regarding undocumented immigrants and Muslims. The Baylor Law School graduate doesn’t reserve his wildly controversial views solely for sympathetic viewing audiences, though.
In truth, Gohmert has issued some of his most irresponsible and racist diatribes from the floor of the House.
In July 2010, for example, Gohmert offered one of his most infamous rants before his fellow representatives: the “terror babies” conspiracy theory. He claimed that “It appeared that [the terrorists] would have young women, who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby… And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists… And then one day, twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”
This past summer, Gohmert bizarrely compared children fleeing rampant and well-documented violence in a trio of Central American countries to the Allied invasion of occupied France on D-Day. That most of the children were surrendering themselves directly to Customs & Border Patrol agents and were under the age of ten didn’t faze him: “I’m not advocating an invasion into Mexico. I’m advocating strongly we stop the invasion into the United States.”
Never far from controversy, Gohmert is even closer to leaders of the organized anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant movements.
For the last four years, he has spoken and has been honored with an award at the annual conference of ACT! for America, the largest grassroots and policy organization within this country’s anti-Muslim movement. Similarly, over the past two years Gohmert has spoken before no less than two large fundraising events for the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC). David Horowitz, for which the group is named, is probably the largest private donor to anti-Muslim organizations in the country. He also operates more than a few of his own bigoted endeavors beyond DHFC, like FrontPage Magazine.
Gohmert has also appeared numerous times on Frank Gaffney’s internet radio show, “Secure Freedom Radio,” where he has shared such bigoted sound-bites as, “You look at the decisions [the Obama Administration] made especially in the last two years in going through the revolutions in Northern Africa and across the Middle East and to the Far East, and the only way you can explain the horrendous decisions that were so completely wrongheaded would be if this administration had a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood members giving them advice.” Frank Gaffney, who runs the Center for Security Policy, is one of the figureheads of the organized anti-Muslim movement and is one of its foremost conspiracy theorists.
Specifically, Gaffney is a central proponent of the conspiracy that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated nearly every level of our federal government and is secretly attempting to control it from within.
In offering “proof” of such nonsense, Gaffney and others have collectively targeted Hillary Clinton’s long time aide and former Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin. They claim that Abedin is a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood who wields influence on its behalf. As he alludes in the quote above from Gaffney’s show, Gohmert apparently agrees.
Certainly in practice, he does. Gohmert was one of five Republicans who led a McCarthy-esque witch hunt against Abedin, in which they openly claimed she was a secret Muslim Brotherhood operative. They even wrote a letter to the DOJ and State Department, asking officials to investigate Abedin as an integral player in a greater Muslim Brotherhood plot to control the White House.
Through his connections to leaders of organized bigotry outside of the House and from his speeches from inside Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert has proven time-and-again that not only is he not a friend to immigrants and Muslims, but rather he views them as his and America’s worst enemies. As alarming as his views are, what is of even larger and more urgent concern is that he has injected the bigoted agendas of well organized and funded movements of professional bigots into the official business of the U.S. Congress.