Campaign Diaries

H.R. 1503, the legislation that makes a congressional issue out of Birther concerns, has gained an additional co-sponsor: Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican who represents TX-01 ever since Tom Delay’s mid-decade redistricting allowed him to handily defeat Democratic Rep. Max Slandin in 2004.

That means that 11 congressmen are now championing H.R. 1503: Posey, Goodlatte, Blackburn, Campbell, Carter, Culberson, Neugebauer, Burton, Marchant, Poe and now Gohmert. 6 of them are from Texas, so 30% of the state’s Republican delegation is now on board. And Kay Bailey Hutchison thinks she has a chance of defeating Rick Perry next year?

Unlike some of the other Republicans on that list, Gohmert has no qualms about questioning Barack Obama’s place of birth. Asked by The Washington Post whether he believed Obama was born in Kenya, Gohmert answered: “I don’t know if it’s true or not. But I read that Lou Dobbs said [Obama's] original birth certificate was destroyed.”

A congressman is willing to jump on a movement’s bandwagon because he read about what a TV host had to say about it? The fact that Gohmert’s fears are verifiably untrue make matters all the more stunning as they point to some Republicans’ willingness to believe just about anything that is said about Obama. But perhaps we should not be so surprised: In the same interview, Gohmert displays an absolute indifference towards independent fact-checking: Asked what he made of Hawaii officials’ repeated confirmations that Obama was born in Honolulu, Gohmert responded “That’s what they say… I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

A former county judge who was appointed to the state’s Court of Appeals by Governor Perry, Gohmert has some experience jumping on board of such conspiracy theories and his decision to co-sponsor H.R. 1503 is in no way a surprise. After all, he was one of the first co-sponsors of Michele Bachmann’s foreign currency-banning constitutional amendment. This means that a majority of the Birther champions (6 out of 11) are now also co-sponsoring the Bachmann bill.

Gohmert is now focusing on channeling the right’s health care fears. For instance, here are comments from a recent interview he conducted on Alex Jones’s radio show:

We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens. They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as early as they need… I would rather stop this socialization of health care because once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, where you live…

But if we’re going to pay 700 million dollars like we voted last Friday to put condoms on wild horses, and I know it just says an un-permanent enhanced contraception whatever the heck that is. I guess it follows that they’re eventually get around to doing it to us.

Let’s jump over the fact that health care reform as it is shaping up looks nothing like a British-style nationalization of health care and let’s go to an even more urgent point: It’s one thing to argue that government-run health care will result in higher mortality because the quality of care will decrease and because there’ll be longer waiting periods that seniors will not be able to wait through. But that’s not what Gohmert is getting at: By using the active form and the expression “force to,” he is suggesting that Democrats want seniors to die and that health care reform is a vast conspiracy meant to get rid of older citizens.

Does that sound like too much? Well, it’s a conspiracy theory that seems to be spreading. Here are, for instance, the ravings of Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson:

I’d been wondering why the liberals are so passionate about this Health Care thing… When I suddenly awoke at 3 a.m. I had the answer. Euthanasia! Social Security and Medicare are broke. Baby boomers, like me, are getting old and will soon be asking for it. Socialized medicine makes people die… One less person in line for Social Security and Medicare!

It’s not surprising that such arguments are being made. What is (a bit) surprising is that there are well-established politicians willing to embrace any viral rumor that spreads through meetings of conservative activists or through the blogosphere.

Note that concerns over euthanasia has become one of the GOP’s favorite talking-points this summer. Granted, most do not take that to mean that the White House is solely motivated by the need to find ways to legally kill seniors, but they aren’t necessarily that far off: Republicans are up-in-arm about a provision of the House Democrats’ health care bill that, in the words of a letter signs by Boehner and McCotter, “could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide because it does not clearly exclude counseling about the supposed benefits of killing oneself.”

The New York Post’s Betsy McCaughey doubles down:

One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and “the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration. This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care.

Over on TNR, Harrold Pollack points out that the bill in no way mandates counseling sessions. To their credit, the Republicans who signed the letter cited above do not suggest that such a session would be required but their goal is the same: Scare seniors into opposing health care reform, as this politically powerful constituency could scare just enough Democrats to sink any legislation in the fall. And we see where such concerns lead in comments like Victoria Jackson’s and Louie Gohmert’s.