The Tea Party Wants Louie Gohmert to Take John Cornyn's Seat in the Senate

Louie Gohmert

There's a Tumblr waiting to be made about U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert. Maybe "Sh*t Gohmert Says" or "Texts from Louie." Right Wing Watch, where the Tyler Republican garners only slightly fewer mentions than Glenn Beck, does a solid job, but its reports lack the proper memeiness to properly convey the full scope of Gohmert's absurdity.

The Tumblr thing needs to exist sooner rather than later, because Gohmert's star is rising. There's now an actual movement to get Gohmert to challenge fellow Republican John Cornyn for his Senate seat. The National Review's Betsy Woodruff published a piece on Wednesday afternoon explaining this.

Louie Gohmert for Senate? That's what a number of Texas tea-party activists are hoping for. They're not happy with Senator John Cornyn, and Katrina Pierson, who serves on the Texas Tea Party Caucus Advisory Board, tells me she's heard from a number of activists pushing for the outspoken East Texas congressman to challenge the senator.

And JoAnn Fleming, the executive director of East Texas-based Grassroots America We The People, says she's hearing the same thing. She knows Gohmert personally and says she's had numerous activists tell her she should ask the congressman to run.

"I've had people ask me to ask him," she says. "That hasn't diminished."

The Tea Party, riding high off its propulsion of Ted Cruz to the national stage, is outraged that Cornyn pulled his name off a letter pledging a government shutdown if Obamacare isn't defunded. They're also mad that he hasn't scheduled many town hall meetings, leading to an August 17 mock town hall in Dallas in which activists will bring cardboard cutouts and milk cartons featuring Cornyn's face to take the podium in his stead.

They would prefer Gohmert's down-home swagger and stubborn refusal to be swayed by inconvenient facts.

There are a laundry list of reasons that's a bad idea. Here are a few:

- Gohmert thinks women are sneaking into the U.S. to give birth to future terrorists, aka "terror babies."

- He blamed the massacre of theater patrons in Aurora, Colorado on "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs."

- He thinks elementary school principals should carry assault rifles.

- The basic workings of email are a mystery to him.

- He thinks terrorists are "being trained to come in and act like they're Hispanic when they're radical Islamist," confounding American intelligence officials who think all brown people look the same.

- He thinks sex ed teaches kids how to breed.

- He makes Steve Blow sad.

For now, at least, Gohmert's saying he's not interested in gunning for Cornyn or seeking the presidency, which he says people have also asked him to do. "Before I dive in, I need to feel it in my heart," he told the Washington Examiner. "I don't feel it in my heart right now."