I live in East Tennessee and am presently focused on the Congressional mid-terms. So when my local Republican Congressman Phil Roe has any kind of connection to some nuttiness in an adjacent state, it naturally catches my attention.
In this case, the connection is Roe’s joint appearance on various legislative proposals with Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks.
Brooks got some national attention back in 2017 when he explained why he wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Instead of repeating the official party-line cover stories about “choice” and “competition” as recited by my Rep. Roe when he took the same position, Brooks blurted uncooked ideas fresh from a raw Republican mind. Even though the whole idea of insurance is to spread risks and costs, in Brooks’ mind illness and injury are moral issues, so it is a good thing to punish sick people for being sick. This is accomplished by requiring them to pay more for medical insurance. Thus, Brooks proposed:
“to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,”
Now this same Mo Brooks may have outdone himself — no easy feat — by taking the rhetoric of climate change denial to a whole new level of ignorance. According to this story, Brooks discounts climate science by arguing that the seas are rising because rocks from seaside cliffs are tumbling into the ocean and filling it up, along with silt from rivers. [I think he just forgot to mention the water displaced by all the boats carrying illegal immigrants to our shores to steal our jobs.]
Dear Rep. Roe — this is your opportunity to show us that you are not the unscientific climate change denier / minimizer that you have been called.
Will you please stand up and tell your Alabama colleague that he is mistaken?
Or do you consider it possible that he is right, or — worse — that Democrats in thrall to Al Gore are deliberately throwing stones into the ocean to raise its level?
If you’re just not sure what is going on, how about allowing your constituents to help out? You could tack a survey question onto your next weekly newsletter. I’m confident that if you ask voters whether sea levels are rising because of too many rocks falling into or being thrown into the ocean, we can offer the necessary guidance to Congress. After all, that’s what us voters are for.
Or you could ask your Democratic opponent. I hear he’ a pretty nice guy, willing to work with anyone who has good ideas, and I bet he’d be happy to assist.