Louie Gohmert (R-DC)?

I'm sure many of you following national Congressional politics caught the procedural wrangling House Republicans pulled to kill discussion of HR 1433, giving the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House and adding another Utah representative to balance that out. Well, it seems that some folks in D.C. were paying pretty close attention to what was being said in floor discussion of that bill. I received an email this morning from a D.C. resident with an interesting take on that discussion:

The District of Columbia has no vote in Congress, but Louie Gohmert (R, TX-1) has generously offered to represent us:

"But I would submit to you that Washington, D.C. is also the only city in the entire country that every Senator and every Member of Congress has a vested interest in seeing that it works properly, that water works, sewer works, and no other city in America has that."

-- Representative Louie Gohmert (R, TX-01), arguing against voting representation in Congress for the citizens of Washington, DC, in the Congressional Record, March 22, 2007, H2845.

No other Congressmen or Senators jumped up and said "Amen," so the Federal Income Tax-paying people of DC now consider Louie our new, voting congressman, and are phoning and emailing him with our concerns ranging from war and peace to parking and trash pickup.

Mr. Gohmert was an Eagle Scout and judge, and teaches Sunday School, so we take him at his word when he claims to represent us. Never mind that so many others -- from Andrew Jackson to Kenneth Starr -- feel that DC should have a vote in Congress. Louie Gohmert is Washington DC's Congressman unless Congress says our own elected representative can have a vote. We would sure hate to lose a congressman who knows as much about urban issues as Louie does.

Until then, we thank the people of the First Congressional District of Texas for sharing Mr. Gohmert with us, and apologize for any delay in their own constituent service -- after all, we outnumber them.

(printed with permission)

Just some individual with a chip on his shoulder, you say? Perhaps — but that doesn't mean he's the only one with the chip. Apparently Rep. Gohmert's statement is getting quite a bit of play in the D.C. blog circuit. And I can't say I blame them. Clearly, Congressional Republicans weren't particularly interested in letting this bill get voted on, most likely because it would pass. But as I'm sure that our friends across the aisle would never consider actually circumventing the democratic process, and were instead truly concerned with the procedural mumbo-jumbo they temporarily derailed this bill with, they'd have no problem with acknowledging the political necessity of fair representation and making good on their — or at least Rep. Gohmert's — commitment to the well-being of D.C. residents. Right?