As you’ll of course recall from back in late March, during the House floor debate on the voting rights issue, Rep. Louie Gohmert volunteered to represent the interests of the District’s voters in the House of Representatives. Considering we still don’t have a full voting member of our own, we kindly thanked the congressman by asking all of you to get in touch with Rep. Gohmert so that he could address your concerns personally. Based on the results of the ensuing deluge of phone calls to his office, Rep. Gohmert didn’t really mean what he said about wanting to help the District of Columbia. But we still have a soft spot in our hearts for the guy — after all, he certainly generated a lot of excitement in the DCist community.
Today, Rep. Gohmert (R-Tex. & D.C.) is back in the headlines. As befitting a man of his obvious character and moral standing, it’s for something truly gentlemanly: stealing a sign from the front of Rep. Heath Shuler’s (D-N.C.) office.
“On Thursday, during House votes, a very angry Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) had some distinctly non-collegial words for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas),” Emily Heil reports for Roll Call’s “Heard on the Hill.” “The words ‘gutless,’ ‘chickens–t’ and ‘thief’ were flung.”
The paper reports, “Shuler, a former NFL quarterback, was spotted towering over a seated Gohmert, wagging a finger in his face during the heated session, spies tell HOH.”
The Roll Call story is subscription only, but Raw Story also has it. The sign in question is one that a group of fiscally conservative Democrats, known as the Blue Dogs, all have outside their offices, depicting the daily federal deficit as well as the average American’s individual share thereof. Gohmert, who later used the sign during debate on the floor about the deficit, denies he stole the sign and that he had merely intended to “borrow it,” — he did return the sign promptly.
Roll Call quotes Gohmert as saying: “Congressman Shuler is such a great guy, I feel sure he did not mean anything too personal,” he said. “I know I did not go into his office; I know I did not steal anything; but I am still trying to discern if he might be right about my being chicken excrement.”
Our congressional representative sure is one classy guy.
