Representative Louie Gohmert

Louis Buller Gohmert Jr. (born August 18, 1953) is an American attorney, politician, and former judge who served as the U.S. representative from Texas’s 1st congressional district from January 3, 2005, to January 3, 2023. A member of the Republican Party and associated with the Tea Party movement, he served nine consecutive terms in the House of Representatives. His political positions have often been characterized as far-right, and during his tenure he became known nationally for his outspoken and frequently controversial public statements, while remaining popular with many of his constituents in East Texas.

Gohmert was born in Pittsburg, Texas, the son of German Texan architect Louis Buller Gohmert and his first wife, Erma Sue (née Brooks). He was raised in nearby Mount Pleasant, Texas, where he graduated from Mount Pleasant High School in 1971. He then enrolled at Texas A&M University on a U.S. Army scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1975. At Texas A&M, he was active in the Corps of Cadets, commanding a cadet brigade and serving as class president. He was a student leader for the Memorial Student Center Student Conference on National Affairs alongside future U.S. Representative Chet Edwards and was a member of the Ross Volunteer Company, the university’s elite honor guard. Gohmert went on to study law at Baylor Law School, receiving his Juris Doctor degree in 1977.

After law school, Gohmert attended The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School (The JAG School) at the University of Virginia and entered the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. From 1978 to 1982 he served in the JAG Corps at Fort Benning, Georgia, where most of his legal service was as a defense attorney. Following his active-duty military service, he returned to Texas and entered private legal practice before embarking on a judicial career. In 1992 he was elected as a state district judge for Texas’s 7th Judicial District, serving Smith County, which includes Tyler, Texas. He was reelected and served three terms, remaining on the bench until 2002. Gohmert first gained national attention in 1996 when, as a condition of probation, he ordered an HIV-positive man convicted of motor vehicle theft to obtain written consent from all future sexual partners on a court-provided form disclosing his HIV status, a requirement that drew criticism from LGBT activists and civil libertarians. In 2002, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed him to fill a vacancy as chief justice of the Texas 12th Court of Appeals, where Gohmert served a six‑month term that ended in 2003.

A mid-decade redistricting in Texas significantly altered the political landscape of the state’s congressional districts and made the 1st District more conservative by shifting Tyler—long the anchor of the 4th District—into the 1st. In the 2004 Republican primary for the 1st District, Gohmert defeated State Representative Wayne Christian of Center, Texas. He went on to defeat Democratic incumbent Max Sandlin in the general election with 61 percent of the vote. Taking office on January 3, 2005, he represented a largely rural and strongly conservative East Texas constituency. Over the course of his nine terms in Congress, he was reelected seven more times, never receiving less than 68 percent of the vote. In some election cycles he faced only minor-party or independent opposition, including an independent challenger in 2008 and a Libertarian opponent in 2010.

During his congressional service, which spanned from 2005 to 2023, Gohmert participated in the legislative process during a period marked by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party movement, and intense partisan polarization. He signed Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge and consistently advocated for lower taxes and reduced federal spending. He proposed a tax holiday bill that would have allowed taxpayers to be exempt for two months from federal income tax withholding, which he argued would help “kick-start” the economy. In fiscal policy debates, he voted against the Budget Control Act of 2011 on the grounds that it did not sufficiently address the federal debt, and he was one of four Republicans to join 161 Democrats in voting against a balanced budget constitutional amendment in November 2011. He strongly supported the Baseline Reform Act of 2013, which would have changed the way the Congressional Budget Office projects discretionary spending by eliminating automatic inflation adjustments, arguing that such a change would clarify what constituted real spending increases or cuts and better align federal budgeting with the experience of American families. He also supported school vouchers and backed legislation to expand their use.

Gohmert’s congressional career was marked by a series of high-profile and often controversial positions and statements. In July 2009 he co-sponsored H.R. 1503, a bill that would have amended the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require presidential campaign committees to file a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate and other documentation to establish constitutional eligibility for the presidency, aligning him with efforts to question President Barack Obama’s eligibility. On January 3, 2013, he broke with House Republican leadership by nominating former Representative Allen West for Speaker of the House, even though West had lost his reelection bid and was no longer a member of Congress. A vocal critic of Speaker John Boehner, Gohmert challenged Boehner’s reelection as Speaker for the 114th Congress when it convened on January 6, 2015; Boehner was reelected, but 25 Republicans declined to support him, and Gohmert received three of those votes. In 2013, some Tea Party activists, including the group Grassroots America We the People, promoted him as a potential primary challenger to Senator John Cornyn, though he did not enter that race. In 2017, amid heightened concerns over political violence following the shooting of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the attack on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, Gohmert said he feared becoming a target of similar gun violence and declined to hold public town hall meetings.

On a range of social and cultural issues, Gohmert took staunchly conservative positions. He opposes abortion and has said he believes life begins at conception. He sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act and voted for the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which would prohibit transporting a minor across state lines for an abortion without parental consent. He maintained a 100 percent pro-life voting record with the National Right to Life Committee. In a May 23, 2013, congressional hearing on a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, he recounted the story of a couple who continued a pregnancy despite serious fetal anomalies and suggested to a witness, Christy Zink, that she should have carried her pregnancy to term despite medical concerns, arguing that decisions would be “more educated” if made with “the child in front of you.” He also opposed LGBT rights throughout his tenure. In 2009 he voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded federal hate-crime protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity. He opposed allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military and voted against the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Repeal Act in 2010. In 2015 he cosponsored a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and a resolution disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. In 2019 he strongly opposed the Equality Act, legislation intended to extend federal civil rights protections to LGBT individuals.

Gohmert was also a prominent skeptic of climate science and environmental regulation. He rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and asserted that supporting data was fraudulent. He opposed cap-and-trade legislation, including the bill that passed the House under Democratic control, and supported expanded oil and gas drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In a 2012 House Natural Resources Committee meeting, he argued in favor of a trans-Alaska pipeline in part by suggesting that the warm oil in the pipeline benefited caribou mating, remarks that were poorly received by other committee members. After Pope Francis issued the encyclical Laudato si’ in 2015, Gohmert publicly disagreed with the pope’s characterization of climate change as a serious problem and later supported the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In a June 2021 House Natural Resources Committee hearing, he asked whether the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management could take actions to change the orbit of the moon or the Earth around the sun to address climate change, a question that drew widespread ridicule. When criticized online, he responded by emphasizing that “BLM” in his remarks referred to the Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter, apparently misunderstanding that the criticism was directed at the substance of his question. Scientific American and other outlets highlighted the scientific and practical impossibility of the suggestion.

On gun policy and public safety, Gohmert consistently aligned with expansive interpretations of Second Amendment rights. Two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, he appeared on Fox News Sunday and argued that the tragedy might have been prevented if educators had been armed. Referring to principal Dawn L. Hochsprung, he said he wished she had an M4 rifle locked in her office so she could have “take[n] his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” and he claimed that the 20 child victims, who were killed with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, had “defensive wounds.” Following the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, he stated that “maybe if we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God’s name in vain, we wouldn’t have the mass killings like we didn’t have before prayer was eliminated from schools.” He opposed federal hate-crime legislation more broadly, arguing that crimes such as assault and murder were already prosecutable under state law. On February 26, 2020, he was one of a small number of representatives to vote against making lynching a federal hate crime, calling the proposed 10-year sentence “ridiculous” and asserting that lynching should be prosecuted under state murder statutes, which in Texas can carry the death penalty.

Gohmert’s record also included opposition to certain federal initiatives aimed at addressing discrimination and inequality. On March 22, 2016, he was one of four representatives to vote against H.R. 4742, a bill authorizing the National Science Foundation to support entrepreneurial programs for women; 383 members voted in favor. He described the bill as “well-intentioned” but argued that it would “discriminate against that young, poverty-stricken boy and encourage the girl,” contending that it improperly favored women over men. His rhetoric on a variety of issues, including comments comparing homosexuality to bestiality, likening President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, describing Hillary Clinton as “mentally challenged,” suggesting that mask-wearing contributed to his own contraction of COVID-19, lamenting the arrests of January 6 Capitol rioters, and equating the cancellation of a television show over homophobic content to Nazism, drew sharp criticism from political opponents and civil rights advocates. Journalists such as Eric Neugeboren of The Texas Tribune described him as an outlier in Congress for his willingness to make unfounded and offensive pronouncements and as a precursor to former President Donald Trump’s brand of populist, establishment-bucking conservatism that embraced provocation and misinformation. According to The Daily Sentinel, while he was often portrayed nationally as “unhinged,” he retained strong support among many voters in his district. In May 2021, in a floor speech, Gohmert acknowledged that many people considered him “the dumbest guy in Congress,” adding that he was “comfortable with who and what I am,” a remark that itself became the subject of media commentary and mockery.

In addition to his legislative and rhetorical activities, Gohmert pursued higher office while still serving in the House. In November 2021, he announced his candidacy for Texas attorney general in the 2022 election, challenging incumbent Republican Ken Paxton in a crowded primary field. Running on a platform that emphasized conservative legal priorities and criticism of perceived federal overreach, he failed to advance to the Republican primary runoff, finishing fourth with approximately 17 percent of the vote. He left Congress at the conclusion of his ninth term on January 3, 2023, after nearly two decades representing Texas’s 1st congressional district during a period of significant political realignment and intensifying partisan conflict in the United States.