Gohmert stated in a House Judiciary Hearing on May 15, 2013, that he believed the FBI did not act with due diligence concerning alleged bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. His contention was that the FBI was more interested in Christian groups such as those led by Billy and Franklin Graham than in groups that might be considered less politically correct to target. Attorney General Eric Holder responded to his claims: “The only observation I was going to make is that you state as a matter of fact what the FBI did and did not do. Unless somebody has done something inappropriate, you don’t have access to the FBI files … I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know. That’s all”. Gohmert objected to this on the grounds that Holder had “challenge[d]” his character and made several unsuccessful attempts to inject his viewpoint as a point of personal privilege.[14]
.. On January 4, 2015, Gohmert announced he would formally challenge Speaker John Boehner for the Speaker of the House position in the 2015 election. He announced the move on Fox & Friends Weekend. He lost to Boehner two days later, on January 6.[1][17]
.. In July 2015, Gohmert delivered a speech to the U.S. Congress in which he called upon the Democratic Party to disband due to its historical support of slavery and racism.[18][19]
.. Gohmert expressed fear that he might become the target of gun violence similar to that experienced by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and refused to hold public town hall meetings.[20]
.. He was one of a number of Republicans who voted against the Budget Control Act of 2011 on grounds it did not do enough to deal with the government’s growing debt.[23]
.. Gohmert does not believe in manmade climate change, and has asserted that data supporting the theory is fraudulent.[28]
.. On August 12, 2010, Gohmert appeared on Anderson Cooper 360° to defend comments he had recently made on the floor of the House regarding “terror babies”. In a speech about national security made on the House floor in June 2010,[42] Gohmert stated that a retired FBI agent had told him that one of the things the FBI had been looking at were terrorist cells overseas sending young women to become pregnant so they would deliver the baby in the United States, and then take the baby with them back to be raised as a terrorist. When adult, this operative—a U.S. citizen by birth—could be easily infiltrated in the U.S. to carry out terrorist actions.[43]
.. In the interview, Gohmert asserted that pregnant women from the Middle East are traveling to the US on tourist visas, planning to deliver the child there.[45]
.. Representative Gohmert was one of three Republicans who called for the resignation of Robert Mueller, the prosecutor investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, on the grounds that he can not conduct his investigation fairly because of his conduct as a prosecutor and as acting director of the FBI.[58][59]
How the G.O.P. Built Donald Trump’s Cages
Republicans who spoke up this time should be asking themselves why a president of their party felt he was enforcing its principles by breaking apart families and caging children.
.. But many, many other party leaders have been venturing ever deeper into the dank jungles of nativist populism for quite some time, exploiting the politics of fear and resentment. Mr. Trump did not invent Republican demonization of “the other” — it came about in two ways: gradually, and then all at once.
.. From the early 1990s to 2000, the conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan kept the Republican Party on its toes, running for president three times with an explicitly isolationist message.
.. But it was during the George W. Bush years that anti-immigrant sentiment started to become more central to the party’s identity.
.. Mr. Bush made comprehensive immigration reform a priority of his second term.
.. Conservative talk radio took up the cause, smacking Mr. Bush as squishy on immigration. The very concept of comprehensive reform became anathema to many on the right.
.. The Great Recession that Mr. Obama inherited did nothing to quell nativist resentment among working-class whites, and the rise of the Tea Party pulled the Republican Party further to the right
.. Just ask Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, who saw his fledgling political career almost snuffed out by his flirtation with comprehensive reform
.. in the wake of Mitt Romney’s presidential loss in 2012, after which the Republican Party briefly decided that one of its principal goals was to improve its image with Hispanic voters.
.. The resulting plan would have done everything from beefing up border security to overhauling visa categories to promoting a merit-based immigration system.
It also provided for the legalization of undocumented immigrants, which meant conservatives hated it.
.. the bill cleared the Senate by an impressive 68-to-32 vote. But John Boehner, then the House speaker, refused to bring it up for a vote in the Republican-controlled lower chamber.
.. Mr. Rubio became a pariah to the Tea Party voters who had propelled him to office three years earlier. Soon, he was denying that he had ever really supported the bill.
.. Party leaders fanned those flames, accusing Mr. Obama of being imperious and “lawless.” In one bit of twisted logic, Mr. Boehner argued that the House couldn’t possibly take up reform legislation because it couldn’t trust Mr. Obama to carry out said legislation.
.. Along the way, Republican candidates continued to play to their base’s darker impulses. On the whole, the rhetoric was subtler than that of the current president
.. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, painting Dreamers as drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
.. Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama: “I’ll do anything short of shooting them”
.. Nor was Mr. Trump the first Republican to promote the idea that within every immigrant lurks a murderer or terrorist.
.. Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, ran around warning of what came to be mocked as the great “terror baby” plot. As Mr. Gohmert told it, radical Islamists were plotting to impregnate droves of young women, who would infiltrate the United States to give birth here. The babies would be shipped back home for terrorist training, then return as adults to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting America.
.. Time and again, given the choice between soothing and stoking nativist animus, Republican lawmakers chose the low road.
.. And he has even less interest in addressing the root causes of migrant families flocking to the border.
.. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security reported, “More individuals sought affirmative asylum from the Northern Triangle Countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) in the last three years than in the prior 15 years combined.”
.. Helping these nations stabilize themselves is key to reducing the flow of asylum seekers. But Mr.
Trump does not like complexity or long-term strategizing.
He prefers casting blame and making threats.
.. In the administration’s budget proposals, it has sought deep cuts in aid to these countries — something Congress has wisely ignored. Removing a financial lifeline from nations already in chaos is hardly a recipe for progress.
.. Mr. Trump’s move to kick out as many people who are from these countries as possible threatens to overwhelm nations ill equipped for such an influx. And without the money that many of the immigrants living here regularly send back to their families, the economies of these countries would further crumble.
.. In 2016, 17 percent of El Salvador’s gross domestic product came from remittances from abroad.
.. America’s immigration mess is not going to be cleaned up anytime soon.
.. conservatives are terrified that the base will punish them if they concede even an inch. Speaker Paul Ryan, with one foot out the door, has no juice. And pretty much everyone assumes that nothing will move through the Senate anyway.
.. Trump is planning fresh crackdowns in the run-up to the midterms, to reassure his base that he has not lost his resolve. If anything, given the fragility of his ego, last week’s flip-flop will make him all the more desperate to prove his strength.
.. Mr. Trump is more a breaker than a fixer.
.. The question now is whether the conference will learn anything useful from this episode.
.. There is also his
- politicization of law enforcement, his
- attempts to undermine public faith in the democratic process, his
- attacks on the press, his
- family’s suspect business dealings and his
- habitual lying
.. this is unlikely to be the last time the president puts members of his party in an uncomfortable, and perhaps untenable, position.
.. The weight of this moment should be recognized. Mr. Trump’s capitulation was not a given. With a little less media scrutiny, fewer heartbreaking photos and fewer calls from angry voters, tent cities could have kept on filling with traumatized children.
.. Having done so much to pave the way for Mr. Trump and his immigration policies, they now owe it to the American people to help keep him in check.
Why Ryan, Undercut by Trump, May Actually Emerge Stronger
But in President Trump, his mercurial partner in the White House, the speaker deftly found a foil to deflect some of the anger that had felled the man he succeeded, John A. Boehner.
President Trump’s fiscal deal with Democratic leaders in Congress — which passed the House with more than a third of Republicans voting against it — infuriated House conservatives, who struck first at Mr. Ryan, but ultimately turned their ire on the Trump White House. By week’s end, the men feeling the lash were Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary and budget director. If anything, Mr. Ryan may have emerged stronger.
.. “He didn’t create it; he’s reacting to it. I think he laid out a course that was acceptable to the conference as a whole, and to conservatives as well, and he had the rug pulled out from underneath him.”
.. He singled out Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and Mr. Ryan by name, saying, “They do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented.”
.. Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican and Freedom Caucus chairman, agreed, warning in an interview that failure on the tax plan would be “extremely damaging for the speaker and for all members of the G.O.P. conference, as well as the president.”
.. By week’s end, tempers among even some of the angriest members of the Freedom Caucus had cooled, and Mr. Meadows insisted that the rumors of a coup in the offing were false.
“I wouldn’t want his job for anything,” he said. “I have a hard enough time keeping 40 members of the Freedom Caucus together.’’
Some moderates said that in cutting a deal with Democrats, Mr. Trump may have done the speaker a favor, demonstrating to hard-line conservatives that they cannot always have their way.
.. As the meeting broke up, some conservatives seemed to feel almost sorry for the speaker. And some of the more unruly voices of the Republican conference were reassessing their uncompromising tone.
Trump’s Hand-to-Hand Combat
“Please stop smiling,” I politely asked Barack Obama as I passed him in Boston’s airport.
It wasn’t just any smile. It was that infectious, magical grin that helped him deflate the Clinton machine and win the White House as a novice senator, a smile full of charm and promise that we didn’t see all that often after 2008.
.. As TMZ put it Friday, when it published pictures of Obama grinning and golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland: “Barack Obama’s not just on vacation — he’s on the most EPIC vacay, and it’s starting to feel like he’s rubbing it in your face.”
.. It looks like the three happiest guys in a jangled, coarsened, belligerent, riven country are Barack Obama, George W. Bush and John Boehner.
.. At a recent Texas Rangers game, there was W., playfully photobombing a Fox Sports reporter doing her standup. And at an energy conference in Houston Wednesday, “Drunk-on-Life” Boehner, as Vanity Fair dubs him, gushed, “I wake up every day, drink my morning coffee and say, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.’”
.. Trump thinks the way to represent America is with a caricature of strength, without understanding it comes across as weakness and boorishness. Even with the weightiest job in the world, he can’t seem to mature beyond the schoolyard bully. Where are you, Melania, anti-bullying spokeswoman and Donald-hand-slapper?
.. Things have gotten into such dangerous territory with verbal and physical violence that in Montana Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter hours before winning a House seat, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, watched as his security goons roughed up protesters in front of the Turkish Embassy during his recent visit here. And that brings us to Trump’s strange love of dictators.
.. “every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”
.. never before have allies had pre-emptive plans on how to counteract an American president’s handshake. Trump’s are more like dominance tests than greetings. First Justin Trudeau in Washington and then Emmanuel Macron in Brussels prepared to out-grip him on his patented “I’ll-rip-your-shoulder-out-and-show-you-who’s-boss” handshake.
.. Donald Trump is not a tough guy. He’s a faux tough guy. That is not even in the American tradition. All of our famously tough icons, on screen and in life, were able to exude strength without using brute force. And they did it while standing up for people, not smacking them down.