Rep. Louie Gohmert could be punished for calling for violence over election

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) filed a resolution on Tuesday calling for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) to be censured over two comments he’s made in the wake of Donald Trump’s loss that appeared to call for a violent overthrow of the government.

“Members of Congress who foment violence and call for the overthrow of our democratically elected government because they are upset about the outcome of a legal president election must be rebuked in the strongest possible terms,” Wasserman Schultz said in a news release. “Instead of calming political tensions, Rep. Gohmert is pouring gas on our match-filled public square.”

Gohmert has been vocal in his quest to overturn Trump’s landslide loss to President-elect Joe Biden, making two comments that explicitly called for violence.

On Jan. 1, after Gohmert lost a lawsuit he filed that sought to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to block the certification of Biden’s victory, Gohmert called for street violence.

“But bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM,” Gohmert said on the right-wing television stations Newsmax.

And back in November, after Trump’s loss, Gohmert urged Trump supporters at a rally in Washington, D.C., to start a revolution like the one in Egypt in 2011, in which 846 people died in protests that helped oust the country’s longtime president, Hosni Mubarak.

“They rose up though all over Egypt, and as a result of the people rising up in the greatest numbers in history, ever anywhere, they turned the country around,” Gohmert said. “If they can do that there, think of what we can do here.”

Censure is the second strongest punishment for a member of Congress after expulsion, and is a tool lawmakers can use to punish members they feel have acted inappropriately. They are rarely used, with just 23 lawmakers being censured since 1832.

It’s unclear whether there will be a vote on the censure resolution Wasserman Schultz filed.

Gohmert, however, isn’t the only GOP lawmaker to use violent rhetoric in recent weeks.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on Monday warned of civil war if Democrats win control of the Senate in two Georgia runoffs.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.