Texas Congressman Steve Stockman-- Domestic Terrorist?

Steve Stockman (R-TX), once again bringing disrepute to Congress

There was some buzz this week over Steve Stockman's bizarre choice of a date for the State of the Union. He brought violence advocate and loudmouthed right-wing clown Ted Nugent. As someone tweeted, they should have held the State of the Union at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame and then Nugent could never have gotten in. When Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who is in a wheelchair and paralyzed from a shooting accident when he was a teenager, questioned Nugent's presence, Nugent responded exactly the way anyone who has paid any attention to him would expect him to respond: "He probably has shit for brains. I couldn't be more proud of myself, what I stand for, and for this pompous ass to claim that he cares more about a family that lost a child than I do is a perfect example of the brain dead critics of Ted Nugent." At the end of the clip below, Rachel Maddow, has the penultimate look into who exactly Ted Nugent is and why it was so inappropriate for Congressman Stockman to invite him. I urge you to watch it.

But what she didn't deal with is who Steve Stockman is. Many Americans think he's just some garden variety right-wing Texas yahoo who got elected to Congress in November. That isn't half the story. Yes, he kicked off the year threatening to impeach President Obama that earned him a lecture from his fellow Republicans to sit down and shut up. But neither that nonsense nor his grandstanding Tuesday night with Nugent was his first-- or worst-- demand for the national spotlight. And as Ken made clear last month, the wacky Steve Stockman of the '90s no longer sounds like an outlier. Ken quoted Dana Milbank on his background:

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.

But that's not the worst of it either. No one wants to talk about the worst of it. Too horrible. In his quest to fulfill the Helen Chenoweth role as militia poster girl for the '90s, Stockman immediately started spouting paranoid anti-government slogans-- that some would define as treason and incitement-- as soon as he was first elected in 1995. Another homeless abused miscreant who turned to drug addiction, like Nugent, Michigan-born Stockman moved to Texas and fell prey to a religionist sect of unhinged snakeoil salesmen. He felt that qualified to help run the country and he started running for Congress in 1990. He won in 1994 and represented parts of Houston as well as Galveston, Chambers and Jefferson counties. Although he worked hard to develop a reputation as the militia's man in Congress, he wound up taking it a bit too far and got involved with the terrorists who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Another Michigan-Texas Republican dupe, a GOP chairwoman of Orange County, Texas, faxed him before they blew up the building and the FBI investigated Stockman's role and his relationship to domestic terrorists. He was defeated for reelection and they seem to have let the complicated and heavily disputed matter slide.

Since his defeat in 1996, he's held a series of right-wing movement make-work positions and has been especially close with another Texas sociopath, Louie Gohmert. He ran for Texas Railway Commissioner in 1998 and was defeated and then jumped at the chance to run in 2006 for Tom DeLay's old seat but couldn't find enough people to sign his petitions to put him on the ballot. Last year he jumped at the chance to run for a brand new seat created in a deeply red area of Texas, the new 36th CD, just south of Gohmertville, east of the Louisiana border and north of Beaumont. Obama only won 25.7% of the vote there, one of 8 of Texas's 36 districts where the president failed to break a third of the votes. Stockman won the seat against Democrat Max Martin 165,388 (71%)- to 62,052 (26%).

The MAN IS BACK-- a perfect representative for one of the saddest and least attractive parts of the United States. Stockman rolled up huge margins in every county, including over 80% in horrifying backward Hardin County where 91% of the people are white and where the per capita income is $17,962 (one of the lowest in America) and over 11% of the population lives below the poverty line. Stockman, of course, is a vehement opponent of raising the minimum wage. The biggest city Hardin-- and in the 36th CD-- is Lumberton, population 11,943. The town was nearly wiped out by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and then took another devastating direct hit Hurricane Ike in 2008. Although Stockman was tempted to vote with his pal Gohmert against authorizing aid for the survivors of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey... even he wasn't that stupid. It was the only intelligent vote he's made so far-- unless you want to count his vote of "present" when Boehner ran for Speaker again last month. At the time, he said "I will not vote for or support Congressman Boehner’s bid to remain Speaker of the House. This is not something I do lightly, but out of bedrock conservative principle and a dire need to save this nation from its current course. We cannot tolerate betrayal of conservative principle and economic reality... I have sharp disagreements with the manner in which he has handled President Obama and House conservatives. While he is all too eager to favorably negotiate with a liberal White House that has outmaneuvered him at every turn, he has been harsh and punitive in dealing with conservatives."

Boehner retaliated by putting him on the Science Committee. The first legislation Stockman offered, H.R. 35, is meant to repeal all ordinances against guns in or near schools and to encourage teachers and school staff to arm themselves. Stockman's top support group, Gun Owners of America (much worse crackpots than the NRA) is urging its members to contact their congressional reps to get them to co-sponsor Stockman's bill.

We told you that Rep. Steve Stockman would be the most aggressive defender of our gun rights on Capitol Hill.

He proved us right on Thursday, when he introduced the VERY FIRST pro-gun bill in the Congress, in the face of a tidal wave of anti-gun hysteria.

...It’s time to go on the offensive! It’s time to repeal gun control, rather than talk about “enforcing the gun laws on the books.”

We don’t want to enforce gun control laws-- that’s what makes innocent people, including children sitting in their classrooms, less safe.

Anti-gun zealots who have enacted one unsuccessful gun ban after another have come up with a slew of reasons why our nation’s lawmakers should be protected by an army of heavily armed guards, but our children should be vulnerable.

There is a word for this-- it’s “hypocrite.” It is time to protect our children with the same tools and the same zeal we use to protect our congressmen.

It is time to pass the Stockman bill and give real protection to our children.

ACTION: Contact your Representative. Ask him to cosponsor H.R. 35, the Stockman repeal of the gun-free school zone ban.

So far 3 especially deranged crackpots, Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell), Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), have signed on as co-sponsors. Not even Gohmert! And govtrack.us rates its chances to ever become law 1%. Right now Boehner crony Bob Goodlatte has it bottled up in the Judiciary Committee, where it won't embarrass other Republicans trying, unlike Stockman, to pose as vaguely mainstream. Josh Marks pointed out at the National Memo that the Republican problem with violence-- which accounts for the widening gender gap-- is much bigger than one lone nut like Steve Stockman or even a pair of cuts like Stockman and Nugent. "Not only does the Republican leadership condone The Crazy, but also the violent tendencies associated with this type of dangerous ideology. Whether it is refusing to back the Violence Against Women Act, fighting against every single sensible gun law, promoting military force over diplomacy or failing to condemn violent rhetoric toward President Obama-- the GOP is gaining a reputation of a political party that cynically accepts violent language and behavior."