One year ago today, we took
our first look at the U.S. House Representative from South Carolina's 4th District, Trey Gowdy, and HOT DAMN is the timing of the anniversary of that for an update perfect right now. Rep. Gowdy is a man who centuries ago, would have made a fine witchfinder general, as he obsessively looks for conspiracies being carried out by Democrats that never actually manifest, and complains about the media when they have the nerve to report when he's unable to find any wrongdoing. Gowdy was placed in charge of the Benghazi Select Committee in 2014, which given current events slowly revealed thanks to Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, looks even more partisan and ridiculous than it did this time last year. In addition to the Benghazi Committee/fiasco/waste of taxpayer money that Gowdy has been making himself famous for, he also tried hyping the IRS scandal, calling for Lois Lerner to be held in contempt of Congress for invoking her 5th amendment right to not testify against herself. It was the first time that Congress held someone in contempt for doing that since... wait for it... Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare hearings. Gowdy also has expressed his desire to use torture not just against terrorists... but against IRS employees to root out all the crimes they committed, "like Jack Bauer on 24", and tried hyping outrage about the closing of the World War II Memorial during the 2013 government shutdown by claiming that special consideration was given to Occupy Wall Street protestors to stay in Zuccotti park (which unlike the war memorial, is privately owned). Rounding out Gowdy's resume is one of the most conservative voting records in Congress, and an hard policy in favor of Voter ID laws that disproportionately curb the ability of minorities to get registered to vote, which he feels "
can't be racist" because sometimes, people in South Carolina elect minorities.
All but one of South Carolina's sitting members in the U.S. House of Representatives are Republican, as the state leans that red, and in 2014, he was unopposed in his primary, and only faced a Libertarian challenger in the general election, winning with 85% of the vote. With no consequences to have curbed his extremely right-wing views, Gowdy's politics veered even farther to the right since the last time we profiled him, as we'll demonstrate under the fold:
-July 10th, 2014: Rep. Gowdy votes for House Amendment 1040, to prevent the implementation of the dreaded United Nations Agenda 21 Treaty, that in spite of just being recommended climate change guidelines, have many conspiracy theorists within the extreme right convinced it's a plot for global domination.
-On 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. Trey Gowdy, however, had no problem with that, and voted for it anyway.
-On February 3rd, 2015: Rep. Gowdy co-sponsors and votes for the latest Republican attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act. This in spite of the fact that the law is not just working, but better than experts predicted.
-On March 3rd, 2015: Gowdy votes against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a Republican protest of President Obama's executive orders on immigration.
-On May 13th, 2015: Trey Gowdy vovoted for HR 36a ban on abortion at 20 weeks, which he also co-sponsored.
-March 27th, 2015: Rep. Gowdy claims that Hillary Clinton had her e-mail served "wiped clean" and that she had failed to respond to subpoenas in the Congressional investigation, receiving a rebuke from his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings, who pointed out that she had already turned over all e-mails that the investigation deemed relevant.
-May 14th, 2015: Trey Gowdy delays a Beghazi hearing, and blames it on the State Department, accusing them of not handing over all the documents he requested (note, this is part of a larger pattern of implying guilt by demanding the Obama administration reveal a complete negative).
-On September 11th, 2015: Gowdy votes against the United States' nuclear treaty with Iran.
-On September 18th, 2015: Rep. Gowdy coco-sponsors and votes with most House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthoodbased on highly edited "sting" videos submitted by a Pro-Life advocacy group that have been repeatedly debunked by investigators.
-September 29th, 2015: Trey Gowdy participates in a different House Oversight debacle, this time harassing Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, and interrupting her to claim she made statements she had never actually said.
I'm not going to act like Trey Gowdy's in any danger of being voted out of office, unless he's beaten in a primary, somehow. Democrats are highly unlikely to unseat him when South Carolina's 4th has been gerrymandered into having a Cook Partisan Voting Index of +15 Republican lean, after all. But a more likely ending to his career might come due to some ethical lapse based on the witch hunts he's participating in on the House Oversight Committee.
I mean, at the moment, as he's claiming the Benghazi investigation isn't partisan, it's amazing that he doesn't show up to hear the deposition of witnesses who were actually on the ground during the attack, but makes it a point to clear his calendar to attend all the hearings where someone close to Hillary Clinton is being questioned. After over $4.5 million in taxpayer dollars have been wasted, multiple Republicans starting to admit the whole investigation is a partisan scheme, and even former investigators claiming they were told to direct their investigation specifically upon Hillary Clinton... Gowdy is growing more desperate every day, even reporting one such investigator, Bradley Podliska, was fired for "a classified info breach" and not refusing to harass Clinton. Podliska, a self-identifying conservative Republican, pointed out Gowdy violated federal law when he released his employment information. (Add the forthcoming court settlement to the cost of Gowdy's Benghazi crusade).
It gets worse for Gowdy. Over the weekend, Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings accused him of deliberately redacting information from documents in the Benghazi investigation back on Oct. 7th from Hillary Clinton's e-mails to give the false impression that she outed a spy and blew his cover. The CIA have confirmed this to be true, and Gowdy has now confessed, that yes, he doctored evidence to try to make Hillary Clinton look bad. This is the "WITCH!" scene in Monty Python & the Holy Grail where Sir Bedivere catches the villagers having tied a fake nose onto their accused target, at this point.
While it seems much more likely we'll be profiling this firebrand for years to come, and documenting how many times he tries and fails to destroy a Democratic administration member, only to have his efforts blow up in his face like Wile E. Coyote with Acme explosives... there are rumors he might be considering just quitting Congress in 2016. Hopefully, that's the case, and whoever replaces him won't be as much of a hack.