U.S. House member Steve Stockman (R-Gunz) is the subject of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. I didn’t even know the House Republicans allowed the Ethics Committee to function, and am doubly surprised that they would allow one of their own to be investigated for, well, anything. So who is this Stockman guy and why are the House Republicans throwing him under the proverbial bus?
Let’s take a moment for some context.
The back bench of the House Republican Caucus has always had more than its fair share of nuts and lunatics, though until recent years, the GOP leadership has made at least token efforts to keep them out of the limelight. Those efforts didn’t always work.
- “B-1 Bob” Dornan served, if that’s the way to phrase it, from 1983-1997; a former Air Force pilot, Dornan made a name for himself with gay-bashing and Jew-baiting pretty much everyone that came onto his radar screen, called then-President Clinton a traitor, physically assaulted a Democratic colleague on the floor of the House, and insisted that the Russian shootdown of KAL 007 was part of a giant conspiracy to kill fellow Republican Larry McDonald. (Sounds pretty normal for these days, huh?)
- In 2006, Ohio Republican Jean Schmidt crawled out of her lair to call Democrat John Murtha a coward, despite his 38 years as a Marine and the Bronze Star he earned in Vietnam.
- Helen Chenowith, a militia fan from Idaho who believed black helicopters were being readied for an all-out assault on red-blooded, gun-totin’ Americans any second now, grabbed every television camera she could to scream her outrage at President Clinton’s tryst with Monica Lewinsky — never mentioning her own ongoing affair with a business partner. The difference, she said, was twofold: she wasn’t President, and God had personally granted her absolution, so it didn’t really count.
The current crop of savages and mental patients includes more familiar names: Louis Gohmert, Michele Bachmann, and Steve King are just the first ones to come to mind.
Generally, the crazier the House Republican, the more power they are granted. Bachmann loves to take the House Intelligence Committee into the Twilight Zone. Gohmert routinely gibbers and throws his food dish from his cage on the House Judiciary Committee. King joins Gohmert in screeching and howling on the Judiciary Committee, when the two aren’t in the corner picking lice out of one another’s hair. They certainly aren’t held accountable for anything.
Which brings us to Steve Stockman, the learned Congressman from Texas. Stockman first made a national name for himself in April 1995 when his office received information about the Oklahoma City bombing an hour after the bombing took place. Stockman, a big fan of violent right-wing militias, had to do a quick two-step to avoid being accused of some sort of involvement with Timothy McVeigh or the militia members who may have given McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols, aid and comfort. Stockman denied any knowledge of the bombing, and said it was mere coincidence that a staffer was working closely with the McVeigh-affiliated Michigan Militia.
Shortly thereafter, he accused the Clinton administration of orchestrating the 1993 Branch Davidian debacle in order to make it easier for the federales to Come Get Our Guns. Take those two incidents and add the extra fillip of Stockman saying that school sex ed programs were a way to promote homosexuality and bestiality, and Stockman became enough of an embarassment to the national body politic for a Democrat to sneak in and snatch his seat after only one term — after a judge ordered some of Texas’s GOP-friendly gerrymandering rolled back because of the blatant racism evident in the redistricting.
He returned to Congress in 2012, after the newly re-gerrymandered Texas district map gave him a shot at a new seat. Apparently he didn’t learn much from his time out of office — after working with Republican think tanks and tossing his Alzheimer’s-ridden father in a VA nursing home, he came scrambling back into politics by cozying up to gun radical Ted Nugent and screaming that the ACA is the spawn of the devil. He’s also, surprise surprise, a big fan of militias — what was in 1995 considered to be a bit fringe is considered mainstream awesome in today’s GOP. Even his bluntly idiotic statement that “if babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted” only caused a minor blip on the outrage meter.
Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes gave some insight into The Crazy That is Stockman in January 2013:
So what did he do to draw the ire of the House Ethics Committee and its somnolent Republican leadership? Well, since it’s the GOP, it may be driven more by politics than any actual concern for ethics, the law, and all that fol-de-rol. Stockman made the unpopular choice to oppose powerful Republican Senator Jon Cornyn for re-election instead of run for his own seat in the 2014 primaries, as a Tea Party-backed challenger. Stockman’s bizarre primary challenge to Cornyn was marked by his failure to mount a serious campaign, his campaign office being condemned by the city fire marshal for safety concerns, and, allegedly, rampant financial misconduct among his staff.
Stockman apparently took $15,000 in contributions directly from congressional staffers — a violation of the few shreds of campaign regulations that remain on the books — and then deliberately misled investigators from the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) who awoke from their collective coma and came, shuffling and yawning, to Stockman for an explanation. Stockman apparently tried to fob the investigators off by claiming that the two contributing staff members resigned their positions on February 12, 2014, gave him two checks for $7,500 each, and then were rehired on February 13. Nothing illegal or suspicious about that, Stockman asserted, so you guys should just go catch some more shut-eye.
Instead of going back into hibernation, the investigators did some checking, and found that the paperwork documenting the resign/rehire pas de deux wasn’t filed until December 2012. As a result of this and other allegations of financial shenanigans, the House Ethics Committee is, if you believe it, actually launching its own investigation.
Don’t get too excited. Stockman is leaving Congress in January 2014. So the House Ethics Committee will probably let him just slink away. But, as my favorite Kossack writer “Hunter” pens:
While the odds remain low that the Republican-led House Ethics Committee will do, as the kids say today, squat, misleading authorities in an effort to cover up illegal campaign donations would constitute a felony.
Take that, Stockman! No one is actually going to prosecute you for the felonies you seem to have committed, but, well, yeah! That’ll learn ya! You just go off to that lucrative position with that influential, billionaire-funded think tank and you think on that thing!
Don’t count Stockman out. He is, after all, from one of the reddest, tea-drenched districts on the face of the planet, and it’s conceivable he could come roaring back onto the political scene, perhaps this time charging back into the fray riding shotgun in a tricked-out Army surplus APV with a roof-mounted 50-caliber machine gun to teach those Democratic weenies just who’s in charge around this place. And by the time he does that, if indeed he does, the political climate could be such that the House Republicans would immediately make him House Majority Leader.
Until then, remember that the Democrat trying manfully to take that seat from Stockman’s anointed GOP successor is Michael Cole.?He offered this statement:
“I hope that the panel does a thorough investigation and that justice is done.”
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page.
Published writer since 2001, focusing on politics, history, Web development, and other topics. First book is coming soon.
