What's frightening, says Dana Milbank, is that the wacky Steve Stockman of the '90s "no longer sounds like an outlier"

"[T]hat's the same [Steve] Stockman I found so entertaining back in the '90s. What's frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier."

-- Dana Milbank, in a WaPo column the other day,
"A House radical is now in the mainstream"

by Ken

The other day Howie was tweeting about one of the elite crazies of the 113th Congress, Texas "domestic terrorist" Steve Stockman, who has now earned the lead-off slot in the ThinkProgress War Room's post "Impeachment? The GOP's Most Extreme Reactions to Obama's Commonsense Gun Safety Plan." Steve earned that spot by announcing plans to introduce articles of impeachment and "calling Obama's anti-gun violence efforts 'an existential threat to this nation.' " Which reminded me that I meant to call attention to a useful bit of perspective offered the other day by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, neatly summed up in the title of that column, "A House radical is now in the mainstream." The column began (links onsite):

When I covered Congress in the mid-1990s, one of my favorite characters was Steve Stockman, a former street vagrant who somehow got swept to power in the Republican Revolution of '94.

Voters in his Texas district, realizing their mistake, swept him out two years later -- but not before he distinguished himself by demanding a federal investigation of the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexuality and by claiming that the deadly 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians was a Clinton administration conspiracy to tighten gun control.

So it was with a mix of nostalgia and delight that I came across a headline on the news Web site Talking Points Memo this week proclaiming, "GOP Rep. Threatens Impeachment If Obama Uses Executive Order on Guns." It turns out that congressman is . . . Steve Stockman. Sixteen years and one failed run for railroad commissioner later, he’s back in the halls of Congress.

But there is a key difference in Stockman’s second act, and it says less about him than about our politics. Back then, he proved too much even for the '94 revolutionaries; his classmates came to shun him and voters in his competitive district sent him packing. But this time, Texas has redrawn its political boundaries, and Stockman's new seat is safe. What's more, his views, outlandish in the House of 1995, are more at home in the House of 2013. On Tuesday night, Stockman was one of 179 House Republicans to vote against aid to Hurricane Sandy's victims.

All these years later, Stockman can still bring the crazy. The problem is he's now just one of many purveyors.

Dana turns nostalgic:

Soon after his out-of-nowhere victory in '94, and a few weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing, he wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno about a fanciful raid on a militia group he thought the feds were planning -- saying that "reliable sources" had informed him "a paramilitary-style attack against Americans" would occur at 4 a.m. on either March 25 or 26. The paranoia continued when he wrote in Guns & Ammo that the federal government "executed" the Branch Davidians because "they owned guns that the government did not wish them to have" and so the Clinton administration could "prove the need for a ban on so-called 'assault weapons.' "

In his brief but glorious term, Stockman established daily prayer meetings in his office and tangled with the Anti-Defamation League for speaking on a radio program of a group that the ADL called anti-Semitic. Midway through his term, he launched an effort to investigate the first Kinsey Report and to cut off federal funding for sex-education programs that might be based on the landmark study.

Ah, the good old days! (One wonders whether those "reliable sources" Steve had back in 1994 have gotten any more reliable in the interim.)

Now back in office, Stockman has hit the ground running. Again working with the Gun Owners of America, a group that makes the National Rifle Association seem moderate by comparison, he introduced the "Safe School Act" that would repeal federal laws banning guns from school zones. "The time has come to end the deadly experiment of disarming peaceable, law-abiding citizens near schools," he said in a letter to colleagues.

And, a week into his new term, now comes the impeachment threat. Stockman said Obama's plan to issue executive orders as part of his gun-violence package is “an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic.” If Obama can do this, he said, "our free republic has effectively ceased to exist." In the news release accompanying his threat, he attached an image of a cannon and the words "come and take it."

Yes, that’s the same Stockman I found so entertaining back in the ’90s. What’s frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier.

#