After picking up an astounding 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, Republicans have selected an extreme contingent of members to lead their caucus and major congressional committees. Bolstered by an infusion of Tea Party and radical freshman members, the House GOP leadership is ready to obstruct the workings of government, roll back progressive reforms, and oppose President Obama at every turn. The Republican leadership appears to have little intention to act as a responsible governing partner and instead plans to promote the agenda of far-right interest groups, the Tea Party, and pro-corporate political groups who buttressed and financed the GOP’s 2010 electoral victory. Incoming Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor are favorites of K Street lobbyists and seek to stop progressive legislation—from equal rights and environmental protection to assistance for middle class families and financial industry regulations—in its tracks. Along with incoming Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Conference Chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), the new GOP leadership team seeks to expandthe power of corporations at the expense of responsible public policy and the rights of working Americans. Moreover, the Tea Party and the Religious Right will be granted more prominent roles in governing as right-wing darlings like Michele Bachmann (R-MN) find new allies in the GOP’s extreme Freshman Class. Praising partisanship and openly refusing to compromise with President Obama and congressional Democrats, House Republicans have not denied the looming possibility of a government shutdown. Just as troubling as the hyper-partisan incoming House leadership are the newly chosen chairmen of congressional committees who intend to turn the original purposes of the committees on their heads: leaders of the Judiciary Committee are determined to undermine the rights of minorities; the Oversight Committee chairman is resolved to stop government oversight of Wall Street; the head of the Health Subcommittee is one of Congress’s most vocal opponents of sexual health education and reproductive rights; the Science Committee chairman wants to put climate change scientists in his crosshairs; and the Republican presiding over the Budget Committee wants to increase the budget deficit in order to provide massive tax breaks for corporations. Partisan attacks, politically-motivated investigations and reckless policy proposals will dominate the agenda of a Republican-run House whose leaders are devoted to obstructing the workings of government and advancing a right-wing direction for the country.

John Boehner, Incoming Speaker of the House

Eric Cantor (R-VA), Incoming Majority Leader

Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Incoming Majority Whip

A trusted ally of John Boehner, California Republican Kevin McCarthy was the author of the Pledge to America, coordinator of the 2010 Young Guns recruiting program, and the Chairman of the 2008 Republican Platform Committee. McCarthy’s speedy rise through the Republican ranks (he was elected to Congress in 2006) is a testament to his unwavering party loyalty and focus on political strategy and messaging. McCarthy was responsible for the GOP’s candidate recruitment efforts in 2010 as part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Young Guns program. He built close ties to corporate donors not only to benefit his own campaign but to help numerous Republican challengers across the country. According to The Nation, “As he was making his move into more elite party circles, McCarthy raised a million dollars for candidates around the country, much of it from the insurance, securities, pharmaceutical, entertainment and healthcare industries.” McCarthy is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, and the insurance and financial industries have been his biggest contributors. In the midst of the 2010 campaign, McCarthy crafted the GOP’s Pledge to America along with staffer and former Exxon lobbyist Brad Wild. Progressives and movement conservatives alike criticized the manifesto, arguing that the document was a rehash of Bush economic policies and short on both vision and substance. Erik Erickson of the prominent conservative blog RedState wrote that McCarthy’s Pledge was “perhaps the most ridiculous thing to come out of Washington since George McClellan.” Despite the GOP’s avowed commitment to balancing the budget, the Pledge calls for tax cuts that would cost trillions of dollars but asks for only $100 billion in budget cuts for next year. McCarthy’s Pledge insists on the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts along with additional tax cuts but does not clearly indicate where it would make spending cuts. In an appearance on MSNBC, McCarthy couldn’t name a single program he would cut. A report by Bloomberg shows that the likely targets of the cuts include vital funding for education, cancer research, police and firefighters, and aid to low-income families. Economist Paul Krugman found that the Pledge contained “nonsensical promises” and that the “Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.” In one of the most devastating critiques of the GOP’s budget gimmicks, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center discovered that if Republicans want to balance the budget while making trillions of dollars worth of tax cuts and maintaining the Pledge’s vow not to cut the defense budget or entitlement programs for seniors and veterans, they would have to “abolish all the rest of government to get to balance by 2020”: Everything. No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more NIH. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress. No more nothin’.” The Pledge’s reckless budget tricks helped confirm McCarthy’s reputation for concentrating on political strategy over sound policymaking. For example, McCarthy constantly disparages the economic stimulus, but requested tens of millions of dollars of stimulus funding for projects in his district. Loyal to his Party’s right-wing social agenda, McCarthy voted against hate crimes legislation, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and opposed the Equal Pay bill and protections for women in the workplace. For his voting record in 2009, He received perfect 100% ratings from the American Conservative Union and Gary Bauer’s far-right Campaign for Working Families. Preferring political grandstanding to serious policymaking, McCarthy helped pass off the GOP’s agenda of irresponsible promises as fiscal conservatism, and authored a platform that demanded balanced budgets while calling for extraordinarily expensive measures. McCarthy’s relentless partisanship allowed him to move quickly through GOP circles in Washington, but he failed to produce a substantive or original agenda for the Republican Party.

Peter Roskam (R-IL), Incoming Chief Deputy Majority Whip

Illinois Republican Peter Roskam will be serving as Kevin McCarthy’s right-hand man as the GOP caucus’s Chief Deputy Whip. Then-state senator Roskam was elected to Congress in 2006 with just 51% of the vote, defeating Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth in the extremely close race to succeed Henry Hyde. Before he was a member of the Illinois state legislature, Roskam began his career in politics by working as a legislative aide to Tom DeLay (R-TX), and later as an aide to Hyde. Roskam has diligently advanced the agenda of corporate lobbyists and Religious Right groups while in Congress, becoming a leading opponent of government oversight, environmental conservation, and rights for women and the LGBT community. Roskam helped organize the GOP caucus’s “America Speaking Out” event, which Rep. McCarthy said would help “the common voice of the common man” shape the Republican Party’s agenda for the next Congress. However, Roskam’s forum served as a platform for lobbyists from corporate interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, who predictably criticized government regulation and oversight on business. Although he’s a member of the Ways and Means Committee who calls himself a principled opponent of government spending and waste, he used taxpayer dollars to advertise his tele-town hall meeting about “out of control spending.” In 2008, Roskam was even caught using taxpayer money to pay for thousands of self-promoting mailings just weeks before the election, which according to government watchdog Public Citizen said was “a clear violation of the franking laws,” which prohibits House members from sending such mailings ninety days before an election. After dismissively referring to climate change as “junk science” while campaigning for Congress, Roskam went on to consistently vote against efforts at improving environmental protection and building a clean energy economy. He is also a prominent supporter of expanding offshore drilling, and erroneously claimed that the country has “enough oil and gas to get us off foreign oil.” Like his predecessor Henry Hyde, one of the House’s most vigorous opponents of abortion, Roskam is a staunch social conservative. He is opposed to a woman’s right to choose without exception, even in the cases of rape or incest. When explaining his opposition to abortion rights for women who have been raped, Roskam facetiously asked in a newspaper interview “why women can have abortions if rapists cannot be executed.” Roskam also is an avowed opponent of stem-cell research, having “led the fight against embryonic stem cell research in the [Illinois] state senate” and later voting against the Stem Cell Research Act. Also while a member of the Illinois State Senate, Roskam was at the forefront of the 2006 opposition to a state law barring discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation, slamming the state’s Human Rights Act as “a building block for gay marriage” that would “lead to some unpleasant situations.” In Congress, Roskam voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, hate crimes laws, and protections for gays and lesbians from discrimination in the workplace. His solidly conservative voting record earned perfect 100% ratings from rightwing, anti-choice and anti-equality organizations like the Family Research Council and Gary Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families.

Jeb Hensarling (R-TX): Incoming Chair of House Republican Conference

Darrell Issa (R-CA), Incoming Chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

Paul Ryan (R-WI): Incoming Chair of the House Budget Committee

As the incoming chair of the Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan has been placed on the GOP leadership fast track. He has received significant praise from Republican politicians and conservative writers for the platform he authored pushing radical economic beliefs and regressive tax policy. A far-right conservative who says Ayn Rand is the reason he became involved in politics, Ryan claims that every political debate in Congress “usually comes down to one conflict – individualism versus collectivism.” Ryan believes that once the government dismantles and privatizes programs such as Social Security, more Americans will stop “listen[ing] to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues.” Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” calls for the elimination and privatization of safety net programs and proposes increasing the tax burden on middle and lower class families while enacting significant tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Independent analysts believe that the congressman’s plan would ultimately increase the federal budget deficit even as it forces the majority of Americans to spend more on taxes and health care services. His “Roadmap” seeks to eliminate the corporate income tax along with taxes on capital gains, dividends and interests. It would also lower the top tax rate from the already low Bush-era level of 35% to 25%, and would abolish the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. The Tax Policy Center found that the top 1% of Americans will receive an eye-popping “117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts” while it would raise “taxes for 95 percent of the population.” Ryan’s plan includes a regressive 8.5 percent consumption tax that raises the price of goods and disproportionately burdens middle and low income families who tend to spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption than do affluent families. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic writes that Ryan’s plan “would amount to the greatest shift of resources from the non-rich to the rich in the history of the United States, by far.” Even though under Ryan’s plan the vast majority of Americans would be forced to pay more in taxes, government services would be greatly diminished. Ryan believes that Social Security is a “collectivist system” that should be abolished, and his “Roadmap” calls for privatizing the program and significantly reducing benefits for new retirees. But Ryan doesn’t stop at Social Security: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities writes that his proposal “would eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).” Instead, seniors, disabled persons, and low-income families would receive a voucher to purchase health services. However, since the value of the vouchers would not be tied to inflation of health costs, “the value of the vouchers would fall further behind the rising cost of health care with each passing year.” People receiving government-subsidized health care wouldn’t be the only ones affected. Ryan’s plan would sharply reduce the likelihood that workers will receive employer-sponsored health care coverage, since it would take away the exclusion from taxable income of employer-based health insurance. As a result, instead of pooling health costs, many older and less healthy Americans would have to buy more expensive insurance plans. Ryan says that a study by the Congressional Budget Office shows his plan would reduce the budget deficit. However, the CBO study only reflects Ryan’s proposed spending cuts and does not take into account changes in government revenue that would result from the plan’s enormous tax cuts for the rich. After dismantling safety net programs and markedly shifting the tax burden to middle class Americans, Ryan’s “Roadmap” actually fails to balance the budget. In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the “plan would leave the federal budget in dire straits for decades as a result of its massive tax cuts for wealthy households and its diversion of Social Security payroll taxes to private accounts” and that “federal debt would soar to about 175 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050.” The Tax Policy Center maintains that by shrinking revenue by close to $4 trillion over ten years, Ryan’s proposal would cause the deficit to grow by around $1.3 trillion by 2020. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes, while “Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas,” the “Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.”

Hal Rogers (R-KY), Incoming Chair of the Appropriations Committee

Despite the GOP’s Tea Party-inspired rhetoric about slashing government spending, waste, and earmarks, the party named a Kentucky congressman who one newspaper dubbed “The Prince of Pork” to chair the House Appropriations Committee. Republican Hal Rogers, the leadership’s choice to chair the powerful committee, pledged to bring “fiscal sanity back to our budgeting process.” But Rogers’s record on fiscal issues reveals him to be one of Congress’s most wasteful spenders—even the conservative National Review called Rogers “an exemplary figure of congressional disgrace” because of his reckless use of homeland security finances. Taxpayers for Common Sense found that Rogers obtained around $264.4 million in earmarks from 2008-2010, and requested over $93 million in earmarks in the last fiscal year alone. Through earmarks, Rogers was able to win $15 million in federal money for a tiny airport in his district, even though, as ABC News reports, it “has so little traffic that the last commercial airline pulled out in February.” He also sponsored a bill that would have provided millions of dollars to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a group based in Namibia that hired the congressman’s daughter to be its grants administrator. And he used taxpayer money to help a “tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman’s son.” David Williams of Citizens Against Government Waste said the congressman’s actions “reeks of nepotism” and are “the kind of thing that gets taxpayers so frustrated with Congress.” Perhaps no episode better represents Rogers’s mismanagement of taxpayer money than his handling of the 2006 homeland security budget when he was the chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. Rogers used the budget as an excuse to provide significant funding to benefit his rural Eastern Kentucky district. A New York Times report found that because of Rogers, the creation of a “Transportation Worker Identification Credential” was delayed for years and became unnecessarily expensive when Rogers compelled the Department of Homeland Security to only use an ID card with outdated and less secure technology in order to help businesses in his congressional district. The New York Times also found that he used homeland security funding to help a start-up company that had recently hired his son, and steered millions of taxpayer dollars to the American Association of Airport Executives, a trade association that paid for the congressman and his wife to go on expensive trips to California, Hawaii, and Ireland. “As the man in charge of Congress’s homeland-security budget,” wrote Jessica Vrazilek of the National Review, “Rogers’s abuse of federal funds is not just a financial scandal — it is a matter of national security.” Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight maintained that Rogers’s actions were “really a perversion of every part of the contracting process.” In 2006, Rolling Stone named Rogers one of its“10 Worst Congressmen,” writing, “No congressman has single-handedly put America at greater risk than Hal Rogers.” Even though the congressman voted against the economic stimulus, he wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking to use stimulus money to expand access to computer centers in Kentucky. And while he is a fierce critic of the health care reform law, which he dubbed a “socialistic, experimental takeover of health care” and a “monstrosity,” Rogers requested that a reform law program finance health clinics in his district. While Rogers has no problem routing huge amounts of taxpayer money to his congressional district, he voted against unemployment insurance, opposed tax breaks for middle class families and small businesses, and efforts to incentivize the use of sustainable and alternative energy. Rogers’s selection as Appropriations Committee Chairman shows that the GOP majority plans to stick to its Washington ways of helping lobbyists and supporting irresponsible budgets, and valuing insider access over good governance.

David Dreier (R-CA), Incoming Chair of the Rules Committee

Ralph Hall (R-TX), Incoming Chair of the Committee on Science and Technology

Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Chair of the Tea Party Caucus and the Constitutional Conservative Caucus

Lamar Smith (R-TX), Incoming Chair of the Judiciary Committee

Texas Republican Lamar Smith has big plans for the House Judiciary Committee, which he will soon chair—plans that involve undermining the rights of immigrants, scrutinizing journalists and the press, and preserving discriminatory laws against gay and lesbian Americans. One of Smith’s foremost proposals is to scrap the right of birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Smith strongly supports the Birthright Citizenship Act, the constitutionally-dubious proposal to end birthright citizenship through statute, along with legislation to allow states to replicate Arizona’s harsh anti-immigrant law. According to Mother Jones, Smith “has a long track record as an immigration hardliner” and “vowed to put a crackdown [on immigrants] at the top of his agenda” in the Judiciary Committee. Smith also intends to block any attempts to give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and effectively opposes anything short of a “deportation-only strategy,” which would be devastating to human rights, families and communities, and the economy. During an interview with Religious Right commentator Bryan Fischer, Smith baselessly charged that “two-thirds of the births in public hospitals are now to illegal immigrant women.” He even referred to the DREAM Act, which provides a path to citizenship for young students and military service members who came into the country illegally when they were children as “a nightmare for the American people,” and told anti-immigrant commentator Lou Dobbs that President Obama was “awfully close to a violation of [his] oath of office” as a result of his immigration policy. He has worked closely with Iowa Republican and anti-immigrant zealot Steve King on immigration policy—one reporter dubbed him King’s “soul mate.” Somos Republicans, a conservative Hispanic organization, even sent a letter to Speaker-designate Boehner asking him to stop Smith from chairing the Judiciary Committee, saying that his “extreme positions” and “insensitive rhetoric towards Hispanics” could jeopardize Republican attempts to win Hispanic votes in the next election. The letter stated that Smith is prepared to use the Judiciary Committee to create “a toxic anti-Hispanic environment” that would be “reprehensible” and “insulting.” Although as a member of the House he cannot vote on nominees for the Supreme Court, Smith wrote a letter condemning Justice Sonia Sotomayor and alleged that she has “personal bias based on ethnicity and gender.” Smith is an outspoken promoter of the “liberal media” myth. Last year he said on Fox News that “the greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack,” rather, “[t]he greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias.” He founded and chairs the Media Fairness Caucus, which he wants to use to take on the “liberal media bias that we see every day.” In the same Fox News interview, Smith went on to say that the “media have given the Obama Administration a free pass” and “you have to rely, frankly, on Fox News…and let me thank Fox, you’re frankly the only balanced coverage out there and it’s much appreciated by a lot of us.” Fervently opposed to women’s reproductive rights, Smith has consistently voted against a woman’s right to choose throughout his twenty-four years in Congress, cosponsored a bill that seeks to eliminate abortion coverage in private insurance plans, and received a 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America. Smith voted against all major legislation ensuring equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, while supporting a ban on adoption by same-sex couples and a constitutional amendment proscribing same-sex marriage. He proudly advertises his 100% ratings from the anti-gay hate groups the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and he recently “asked a federal court to let him and not the Obama administration appeal a ruling that strikes down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act,” saying that he would defend the discriminatory law more vigorously than the Justice Department. Led by an unabashed right-wing radical, the Judiciary Committee is positioned to become a vehicle for the discriminatory policies proposed by Rep. Smith and his far-right allies on The Hill.

Steve King (R-IA): Incoming Vice-Chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law

With one of the most stringently anti-immigrant and ultraconservative records in Congress, Steve King of Iowa is a right-wing firebrand whose admiration for Joe McCarthy is reflected both in his politics and policy proposals. King claims that his first priority in the 112th Congress will be to abolish birthright citizenship, a right plainly established in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. He said that his legislation will attempt to end what he calls the “anchor baby industry” and that if his bill is ruled unconstitutional he will move to amend the Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship. King, who has appeared with violent vigilante groups, defended his proposal to have electrified wire on border fences by saying on the House floor, “We do this with livestock all the time.” He erroneously claimed that illegal immigrants kill 25 Americans each day, and referred to all immigrants as criminals and disease-carriers. King compared illegal immigration to a “slow motion Holocaust” and a “slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States.” Opposed to a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants working and residing in the country, he said that he would only support comprehensive reform if “every time we give amnesty for an illegal alien, we deport a liberal.” He defended profiling by asserting that police officers should be able to distinguish illegal immigrants from citizens “from what kind of clothes people wear – my suit in my case – what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accident [sic] they have, um, the, the type of grooming they might have.” After the deadly earthquake in Haiti, King resisted plans to give Haitian refugees temporary protection status, instead suggesting that deporting refugees already in the U.S. would help Haiti since the country is in “great need of relief workers.” King also fought legislation that would give protective status to translators from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and provide legal status to service members who don’t have citizenship and their families. In 2005, King successfully marshaled opposition to naming an Oakland post office after former Oakland city councilwoman and activist Maudelle Shirek because he believed that Shirek was “un-American.” After Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee accused him of McCarthyism, he said, “If Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy she would realize that he was a hero for America.” On the House floor, King blasted the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus as “separatist groups,” and suggested that a “very, very urban senator, Barack Obama” provided “slavery reparations” through the USDA Pigford II settlement with black farmers. During the presidential election, King maintained if Obama won that Al-Qaeda “would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.” King said that it was “bizarre” for Obama to say his middle name “Hussein” during the inauguration, and asserted that the President “has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race – on the side that favors the black person.” He also dubbed the President a “Marxist” who “doesn’t have an American experience” and is in “violation of his oath of office.” When asked at a rally in support of Arizona’s draconian SB 1070 immigration law if Obama was “bringing small quantities of Muslims into this country,” King replied that he “wouldn’t be surprised that that is the real factual basis.” Just days before Obama’s victory at the polls, he warned Americans, “When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship. There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle.” Earlier this year, he said that Democrats were similar to “Pontius Pilate” and would have supported the Pharaohs of Egypt over the enslaved Israelites in the Bible. On Glenn Beck’s show, King declared that Democrats were trying to “take away the liberty that we have right from God” by having members vote on the health care reform bill on a Sunday. A fierce opponent of LGBT equality, King strongly opposes the Uniting American Families Act, which allows U.S. citizens and legal residents to petition for their permanent partners (including same-sex partners) to obtain U.S. residency or citizenship. He told the Family Research Council that gay Americans should stay in the closet if they wanted to avoid discrimination, and equated gay rights with rights for “unicorns and leprechauns.” After the Iowa Supreme Court said that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, he claimed that Iowa could soon become a “gay marriage Mecca due to the Supreme Court’s latest experiment in social engineering.” King has compared homosexuality to incest and described marriage equality as “a purely socialist concept.” While addressing a rally of supporters of the successful effort to remove three Iowa Supreme Court judges from the bench, King said that gay marriage will lead to the breakdown of the family, religion, and the Constitution: I think that if we can’t defend marriage, that it becomes very hard to defend life. So, if we lose marriage — for instance, if our children are raised in warehouses, so to speak. There have been civilizations that have tried to do that. The Spartans did that. They took the children away and taught them to be warriors. It’s a good way to defend a country, but not much of a way to run a civilization. So, I’m afraid if that happened — if we lose the marriage, we lose the home, we lose the nuclear family then we can’t teach our values. We won’t be able to teach our faith. We won’t be able to teach life. We won’t be able to teach our Constitutional values either. That’s why I’m afraid it’s going to be very, very difficult to defend life. King was also the only member of the House to vote against a plaque commemorating the slaves who helped build the Capitol, which he said was part of a plot “by liberals in Congress toscrub references to America’s Christian heritage from our nation’s Capitol.”

Louie Gohmert (R-TX): Incoming Vice-Chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security

Republican conspiracy theorist Louie Gohmert is set to lead one of the most important subcommittees dealing with issues of terrorism and security. On the House floor, Gohmert claimed that “terrorist cells overseas” were planning to bring pregnant women “into the United States to have a baby” so the babies could become U.S. citizens. “And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists,” Gohmert explained, “and then one day, twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.” While Gohmert said that a retired FBI agent corroborated his statements, the former FBI assistant director of international operations said that “there was never a credible report — or any report, for that matter — coming across through all the various mechanisms of communication to indicate that there was such a plan for these terror babies to be born.” When CNN’s Anderson Cooper challenged Gohmert to confirm his terrorist baby conspiracy, the congressman admitted that he had not discussed the issue with the FBI and refused to reveal his sources or present any evidence confirming his allegation. Gohmert is a co-sponsor of the House “Birther Bill,” which targets not ‘terrorist babies,’ but President Obama, who some conspiracy theorists claim was not born in the country and therefore is not eligible to serve as president. He also propagated the “death panels” conspiracy theory about health care reform, alleging that the reform law is “going to absolutely kill senior citizens” by supposedly “put[ting] them on lists and forc[ing] them to die early.” According to Gohmert, “once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, where you live.” Gohmert has appeared on the show of radio host Alex Jones of InfoWars, who suggested that the US government was behind 9/11 and the Oklahoma Federal Building terrorist attacks. On the show, the congressman agreed with Jones’s comparison of Obama to Adolph Hitler, calling Hitler “the best example.” Gohmert later said on the House floor that Hitler, like Obama, “sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.” “We do have useful idiots today,” Gohmert continued, “who are heard to say ‘wow what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.’” On the House floor, Gohmert also likened homosexuality to bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia. He told the Family Research Council that he opposes allowing gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly in the military because gays “cannot control their hormones to the point that they are a distraction to the good order and discipline of the military.” When speaking against hate crimes legislation, Gohmert asked, “You think a pregnant mother does not deserve the protection of a homosexual? You think a military member doesn’t deserve the protection of a transvestite?” Opposing plans to protect endangered wildlife abroad in countries like China, Gohmert claimed on the House floor, “There is no assurance that if we did that we wouldn’t end up with ‘moo goo dog pan’ or ‘moo goo cat pan.’” Gohmert agreed with members of his party who want a government shutdown, maintaining: “If you can’t get [spending] under control, then we just stop government ‘til you realize, you know, ‘yes we can.’”