Gohmert’s screeds will continue until the end

Plus, one way Uvalde resembles East Texas

Republican Louie Gohmert of Tyler has roughly six months left before he finishes his Congressional career and leaves the U.S. House of Representatives forever. He seems to want to use that time to prove to the world the stunning depth of his ineptitude.

In one week, two news clips showing Louie at his, uh, “Louie-est” appeared across the news.

In the first clip an obviously angry Gohmert — red-faced, veins bulging, jaw muscles tight — is railing because Democrats have the temerity to suggest that the GOP cares more about guns than people after an 18-year-old blasted 21 people — mostly children — to their deaths in a Uvalde school.

“How dare you? You think we don’t have hearts? It is just that when we look at the things you are doing and you are trying to do to America…. We’ve seen the carnage. Democrats control the major cities that have the worst murder rates. That’s right. Your ideas have been shown to get people killed,” Gohmert said.

Gohmert went on to list a group of cities with “Democrat” mayors with high murder rates. I didn’t check his figures, but I have no doubt that they are correct. Gun violence is an epidemic across the United States.

Since the horror in Uvalde, there have been more than a dozen mass shootings in the U.S., though fortunately none nearly as violent as that in Texas.

The problem with Gohmert’s whining screed against those horrible “Democrat” mayors is that every city in America must play by the rules that Congress — the one Gohmert belongs to — sets. They are hamstrung by lack of action at the federal level.

Gohmert surely knows this and, as I’ve previously written, it is just the way he and others want it to be. They don’t want individual cities to be able to restrict gun violence.

Here’s an idea: What if you allowed cities to set their own gun control laws?

Doing that would never be allowed by the Supreme Court, no matter how carefully it was written, but it might really show the difference between cities.

This would be a lot like Matt Dillon did in old Dodge City. If someone even showed a hint of misbehaving, he took their guns away. That was fiction, but it was fact when Wyatt Earp was sheriff in Tombstone, Az. and banned the wearing of guns in town. That little disagreement was one of the issues that led to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Earp was a real law-and-order kind of guy.

Earp couldn’t get elected today, of course, which is why the Republicans would never consider such a law even if they could.

In the second clip, Gohmert vented his frustration over the indictment of former White House adviser Peter Navarro, while Democratic attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted within the same week.

“It actually puts an exclamation point on the fact that we have a two-tiered justice system. If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you. They’re gonna bury you. They’re gonna put you in the D.C. jail and terrorize and torture you and not live up to the Constitution there,” Gohmert said.

Since Gohmert served as a judge for years, I’m pretty sure he understands the difference between an indictment and an acquittal. Both Navarro and Sussmann were indicted, so where’s the difference in treatment?

Navarro isn’t going to be acquitted, of course, because he made no secret of his intention to disobey the Congressional subpoena. If one willfully disobeys the law and announces to the world that he is doing so, getting indicted and arrested cannot be considered abnormal.

In normal life, six months passes so quickly but that’s not Gohmert time. It will seem like years before his term is done, though, truthfully, he barely made a mark in Congress during his time there. His biggest impact came on right-wing television and radio shows, and in the news clips with his latest goofy theory.

Here’s hoping the next representative is just a bit better.

***

Uvalde is still on my mind, as it should be. The fact is, it should never leave the top of my mind, or yours.

Have you ever heard so much about a news event that you get exasperated and just wish journalists would stop it, let it go?

I’m a journalist and I’ve felt that way plenty of times. With then case of Uvalde, though, the coverage and writing should not stop even when we wish it would. Until we finally get more than we can stand, mass murders such as this are going to continue.

If you think it can’t get any worse than this, you’re flat wrong. It can get worse and if we do not do something to stop the violence, it almost certainly will.

Hounding your state legislator or congressman probably is not going to work if they don’t already believe that something must be done.

You are probably going to need a new representative. Fortunately, there are elections that happen every two years that can help change the way our legislature and Congress thinks. Every one change helps, makes the chance better that something will be done.

Like much of East Texas, Uvalde is a city that has been damaged by racism and exclusion. Just as in most East Texas cities, it took until the 1970s for Uvalde to integrate schools.

In Uvalde, it was those of Latino descent — the population today is nearly three-fourths Latino — who were shuffled off to the substandard schools, with old, used books and little equipment.

The students themselves helped make the change. Under student leadership, most of the Latino students walked out of school one day.

And then they didn’t come back.

At least not for more than six weeks all the while the school district was losing money. That action and a federal lawsuit demanding integration finally leveled the educational playing field.

The slaughter in Uvalde was not a hate crime by traditional standards but it is hard to not think of what has come before when you see such a crime. Discrimination warps minds in ways that we cannot imagine.