“Crazy/Republican of the Day” is proud to prevent our 505th original profile today, and we’ll be talking about Keith Rothfus, the U.S. House Representative for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District who was first elected in 2012, and is currently serving in his second term in office after winning by almost 20 points in the 2014 elections. While his name might not jump out compared to some of the wilder Tea Party Republicans floating around the past few years, Rothfus has still joined in some of the more extreme partisan efforts of his cohorts, like say voting for the 2013 Government Shutdown, and then when the time came to reopen the government, voting to keep it closed. You might not get many quotes out of Rothfus that make him trend on social media, but when you look at his record and issue stances, he still adamantly opposes same sex marriage, wants to privatize Social Security, and wants to restrict women’s reproductive ways in as many ways as can be thought of.
That latter point, and his love for Government Shutdowns crossed paths during the faux-outrage over Planned Parenthood in 2015, as Rep. Rothfus was actually one of 28 Republican men who threatened to shut down the government, again, over their inability to defund an organization who only uses about 3% of their budget on abortions, none of which comes from whatever government funding they do receive (that all goes towards women’s health). You know, what passes for reasonable Republican governance in this day and age.
Keith Rothfus participated in the GOP’s smear campaign against Planned Parenthood, where he described “crushing baby parts” and how “ghoulish” the organization was… (y’know, the sort of rhetoric that served as a stochastic terror trigger to inspire Roland Dear to go and shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs… thanks for that, Rep. Rothfus, you wanker.) …after investigations into Planned Parenthoods turned up nothing, and the Center for Medical Progress actually ended up having two of their leaders indicted for tampering with government records… Rothfus still insists that Planned Parenthood admitted to wrongdoing, and was caught selling human body parts. Because the truth would hurt him too much to admit, it seems.
Back in 2010, then-candidate Rothfus was asked about global warming, and he gave a pretty thorough answer that is textbook climate change denialism, not only refusing to admit that the phenomenon is man-made, but that it’s factual, at all:
”I do not believe it’s man-made, and I am not convinced that it’s a fact. I think the science is still out. I think for the last 15 years we haven’t had any warming. I think you go back when we had a medieval warm period, where we were growing crops in Greenland. We could do that maybe if we kept warming up over the next 20 to 30 years. I do think the jury’s out on that. I’m very dubious as to whether or not this is what they call anthropogenic, man-made. When you talk about 280 parts per billion [sic] I think of carbon, these are very small amounts.”
Rothfus also fits the trope of one of those “poor victimized Christians” in the Republican Party these days, as he took to the floor in May of 2016 to whine about how his “religious freedom” was being threatened in today’s America. And his view on history is a bit myopic:
”From efforts to abolish slavery, secure civil rights, and protect human life, to providing health care, food, shelter, and hope to countless millions, religious organizations have been indispensable to the progress we have made. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 recognized the extraordinary contributions of religious organizations when it preserved their right to hire individuals who shared their beliefs.”
Trumpeting the horn of religious leaders in the Civil Rights Act and their religious freedom is a bit of a double-edged sword. Because, well, it’s true that you had the Reverend Martin Luther King leading the way in a big way in that era, but you also had bigoted people down South who were arguing against interracial marriage and desegregation on the grounds that it violated their “religious freedom”.
And while you might not see Keith Rothfus on cable news all the time, where you do see him comment is in press releases whenever the Supreme Court makes a major ruling, and as a former corporate lawyer, Rothfus always chides them for making rulings that as a conservative, he just doesn’t like. Just last week, he released an amicus brief after the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 against the state of Texas in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, where he was still trying to keep up the illusion (the lie) that “safety” was the motivation behind the undue and unnecessary restrictions placed upon abortion clinics in Texas to shut them down violated a woman’s constitutional right to find access to the procedure. Unfortunately for him, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott revealed it was really an excuse to “protect innocent life”, in other words the unborn, and had nothing to do with women’s health.
Then there’s the matter of Rothfus’ voting record:
- January 15th, 2013: Keith Rothfus votes against disaster relief funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
- February 28th, 2013: Rep. Rothfus votes against the new version of the Violence Against Women Act.
- June 19th, 2013: Rothfus votes against restoring $20.5 billion towards the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.
- September 30th, 2013: Rep. Rothfus voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown. When the time came to vote to re-open the federal government, Rothfus voted to keep it closed.
- Feb 26th, 2014: Keith Rothfus goes “all in” on the faux-scandal surrounding the IRS researching SuperPACs by co-sponsoring and voting for the “Stop the Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act”. (Note: No one was actually found to be doing this after the investigation of the IRS was complete.)
- July 10th, 2014: Rothfus 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.
- 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. Keith Rothfus, however, had no problem with that, and voted for it anyway.
February 3rd, 2015: Rep. Rothfus co-sponsors and votes for the 60th 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.
- March 3rd, 2015: Rothfus 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: Keith Rothfus co-sponsors and votes for HR 36, a 20 week abortion ban.
- September 11th, 2015: Rothfus votes against the United States’ nuclear treaty with Iran.
- September 18th, 2015: Rep. Rothfus 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: Rothfus 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. One terrorist had a fake passport of a member of Assad’s army, apparently to create a false trail to help in their escape, or hoping that the attacks would be blamed on Syrian refugees, and the governments of nations like France and the United States would fall for it and not allow refugees to escape ISIS abroad. And… the Congressman fell for it.
- February 2nd, 2016: Keith Rothfus votes for HR 3762, the 61st attempt by Congressional Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which is still working better than was predicted).
- May 19th, 2016: Rep. Rothfus votes against House Amendment 1079, which would have prohibited the use of federal funds for discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. So if you were wondering, yes, he’s pro-discrimination, apparently.
Jason Altmire narrowly survived the Tea Party Wave in 2010 to hold onto what was Pennsylvania’s 4th for Democrats, barely edging out Rothfus with 51% of the vote, but then, the GOP redrew the electoral map, and suddenly, the newly forged Pennsylvania’s 12th had a +9 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and someone like Keith Rothfus could coast to general election victories there. Erin McClelland, the Democrat who was shellacked by Rothfus in 2014, will try her luck at knocking him off again in 2016, and hope that having Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket will deter GOP voter turnout enough to help her flip this district back to the Democrats, gerrymandering be damned.
One Year Ago, July 4th, 2015: Richard K. Jones (OH)
