The Jon Lovitz impersonator you’re looking at is the topic of our 499th “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, David Rouzer, the current U.S. House Representative from North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, now serving in his freshman term in office. He lost in 2012 to nine-term Congressman Mike McIntyre by only about 600 votes, but in the 2014 mid-terms, coasted to victory with 59% of the vote over Democrat Jonathon Barfield after McIntyre retired. Rouzer had already established himself as a staunch conservative while he served in the North Carolina State Senate, aligning himself as a climate change denier who tried blocking studies of sea level change, showing he was downright archaic when it came to education, what with his support of corporal punishment without parental exemption in schools, and his homophobic streak being proven by his opposition to anti-bullying measures that would protect LGBT students and his support for a state constitutional ban on same sex marriage.
He hasn’t mellowed out much since heading to our nation’s capitol, either, since he was willing to state his desire to have another government shutdown over the fact that the GOP was unable to defund Planned Parenthood, after he took the fraudulent video produced by the Center for Medical Progress (whose leaders have since been indicted for their deception). Only two years after the last time Republicans shut the government down, and got nothing but costing millions upon million dollars for our country, and threatening government workers with being furloughed, Rouzer was ready to repeat that over a shoddy hoax.
Rouzer also had some interesting legislation he drafted like his bill was to drug test welfare recipients nationally. Whenever states have passed such laws and adopted them, they have lost a fortune on the cost of drug testing, and found statistically less drug use by those on government assistance, without any “savings” of throwing people off welfare. Even worse, the states have lost money on court cases when the same Republicans supporting these bills see their legislation challenged by ACLU lawsuits, and they get overturned as being violations of the 4th Amendment. But that’s David Rouzer for you… take a failed, s*** idea at the state level and try to do it across the country.
Let’s do a full timeline of the rest of Rouzer’s remarks, and voting record, from his first term:
- January 22nd, 2015: An anti-abortion bill, HR 7, was moving through the House, and was halted because even some members of the GOP were put off by the language in the bill regarding its definition of rape. David Rouzer, however, had no problem with that, and voted for it anyway.
- February 3rd, 2015: Rep. Rouzer co-sponsors and votes for the 60th Republican attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act.
- March 3rd, 2015: Rouzer votes against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a Republican protest of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
- May 13th, 2015: David Rouzer co-sponsors and votes for HR 36, a 20 week abortion ban.
- June 26th, 2015: Rep. Rouzer releases a statement after the Supreme Court rules in the Obergefell v. Hodges case in favor of marriage equality, saying it would be against the will of our Founding Fathers, and that it created a “slippery slope of shifting sand”.
- September 11th, 2015: Rouzer votes against the United States’ nuclear treaty with Iran.
- September 18th, 2015: Rep. Rouzer co-sponsors and votes for the bill created by House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, based on highly edited “sting” videos submitted by a Pro-Life advocacy group that have been repeatedly debunked by investigators.
- November 19th, 2015: Rouzer co-sponsors and votes for the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, reacting to the terror attacks in Paris by jihadists from France and Belgium by trying to create greater restrictions to keep out Syrian refugees, of whom exactly zero were involved in those attacks.
- February 2nd, 2016: David Rouzer votes for HR 3762, the 61st attempt by Congressional Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which is still working better than was predicted).
- February 22nd, 2016: Rouzer signs on to an official letter drafted by several members of the Republican House to urge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to block any and all attempts by the Obama administration to name a new Supreme Court Justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia, and to wait until the next president takes office. This with almost a whole eleven months left in his presidency.
- May 19th, 2016: Rep. Rouzer votes against House Amendment 1079, which would have prohibited the use of federal funds for discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
North Carolina’s 7th District has been gerrymandered since the 2010 elections enough that it has a +12 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Your Democratic underdog challenging Rouzer for his seat and trying to make him a one-term wonder is J. Wesley Casteen, a Libertarian accountant turned lawyer who switched parties to Democrat to make a run for office (Casteen ran for a judgeship in 2010 and lost). It seems unlikely that this seat will be flipped blue.
(Seriously, though… why does he look so much like Jon Lovitz? It’s uncanny.)
One Year Ago, June 19th, 2015: Linda McMahon (CT)