On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from California’s 48th Congressional District, Dana Rohrabacher, a man who seemingly has yet to read a conspiracy theory he doesn’t like. Among his favorites are the theories that the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was carried out by Muslims, and not domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, that RFK actually had multiple assassins and not just Sirhan Sirhan trying to kill him (Rohrbacher is believed to have visited Sirhan in prison disguised in drag to ask him about it), that Google was using their search engine to hide “the truth” presented in Dinesh D’Souza’s documentaries, and that President Obama left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other men to die in Benghazi purposefully during the attacks to help guarantee he’d win the 2012 elections (because that’s the sort of thing that wins votes?). On top of that, Rohrabacher is a renowned figure who stands against the theory of man-made climate change, instead blaming the phenomenon on “dinosaur flatulence”, and welcomed the impending 2013 Government Shutdown by going on CNN while believed to be gleefully drunk from celebrating the failure of his party to compromise and, y’know, govern. Can you think of anything that’s a worse look for a political party anywhere in the world than looking on the bright side of an ISIS terror attack? Because on June 10th, 2017, Rohrabacher, on video, is shown talking about how it was “a good thing” that the Islamic State carried out a terror attack on the Iranian parliament in Tehran, and that maybe the United States should consider working WITH them. He didn’t exactly back off of these remarks, either, releasing a statement where he claimed ISIS was “no better” than the Iranian regime. Days later, Rohrabacher, somehow a member of the House Science Space and Technology Committee, was listening to testimony from NASA scientist Kevin Farley regarding Mars, and he took the time to ask if there was a possibility of ancient civilizations having existed on Mars. No, we’re serious, ROHRABACHER ASKED THAT.
Rohrabacher also managed to get some attention just this past week when video of him emerged from February 2018, being interviewed by Voice of America China, in what was supposed to be a message to the audience about our government acknowledging Chinese New Year. And, lo and behold, Dana Rohrabacher is enough of an insane, racist idjit that he started talking about how he believes the racist trope about Chinese people eat dogs. Seriously, click on that link, and look at the still image of the interviewer’s face when he says that.
His love of those conspiracy theories, idiocy on science, and that he speaks glowingly of Vladimir Putin going back to when they hung out in a pub in Russia and were arm-wrestling back in the 1990s, and it came up in the news a few times lately as it was noted that Donald Trump also seemed to have a weird crush on the Russian dictator, and that the 2016 Trump campaign worked in tandem with Russia to interfere in our elections. In fact, as Congress began to learn that Russia was meddling in the first place, audio leaked of a private meeting where among others, House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy were present, and the latter actually volunteered his belief to the group that “There’s two people I think Putin pays, Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God.” The room then bursts into laughter, before Paul Ryan asks everyone to keep the topic being discussed on the mum and to keep the chat within the family (which people listened to him for less than a year). Many people would shrug this off as just a bunch of “joking” among Republicans, but really, Dana Rohrabacher spent most of the summer of 2017 demonstrating how much of a loose cannon that’s going to be a liability for the GOP. How much so? Strap yourselves in, s*** is about to get real enough that you’ll ask yourself how this can be real life.
And, big surprise… immediately after the joint press conference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Dana Rohrabacher was one of the first people to come running to Donald Trump’s defense, and contradict the American intelligence community to claim that the Russians never hacked the 2016 election. Just to be consistent, a few days after that interview, Rohrabacher was ferociously criticizing the indictment of Maria Butina, the Russian spy caught trying to help her country, on behalf of Russian oligarchs, infiltrate the NRA and the Republican Party (and who did so rather easily). Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that Rohrabacher actually met with Butina in 2015. Hmmm…
Rohrabacher has also been left scrambling to cover his links to Russia in the 2016 election, including having to pay back donations his charity had received from a guy you may have heard of for being a Russian pawn named Paul Manafort (the one who just plead guilty and flipped in the Mueller investigation).
“HOLY F***” would be a good reaction to this moment, but not even a month would go by before Rohrabacher was at it again, taking to the floor of the House to defend Donald Trump Jr. for having a meeting at Trump Tower with Russian spies who were promising him information damaging to Hillary Clinton as part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to see Donald Trump elected president, claiming that “it’s not illegal to receive information from someone” (HINT: IT IS UNDER THIS CIRCUMSTANCE FOR SURE, DANA). Making Rohrabacher look even more insane than he is, speaking to an empty chamber, is the fact he was then followed at this idiotic GOP Open Mic Night by both Louis Gohmert and Steve King, who also voiced defenses of Trump, Jr., before having the topic wander into a discussion of blocking payment for medical treatments for transgendered members of our military.
He still wasn’t done. For whatever reason, Rep. Rohrabacher took it upon himself to fly to London in August of 2017, and meet with Julian Assange, from Wikileaks. Because Rohrabacher is claiming that Assange has new revelations about the Russians’ DNC hack, and that he wants to set up a “rendezvous” between the international criminal and Donald Trump. Now, this may be hard to believe, but this bit of political strategy could backfire for Trump, Assange, and Rohrabacher in a big way… because the FBI is already investigating many angles on the Trump/Russia collusion story, one of them being that Wikileaks was used as a proxy by Trump and the Russians to disseminate information from the DNC hack in the first place.
Meanwhile, the FBI are investigating election hacking right damned now from the 2018 election, where Hans Keirstead the third-place finisher to Rohrabacher and his main challenger, Harley Rouda, lost out on the top-two primary by only 125 votes. And Keirstead was the victim of cyber-attacks, supposedly orchestrated by who else… Russia.
And yet, there’s STILL more. Earlier in September of 2017, Rohrabacher began calling for the House Intelligence Committee to host hearings on “the Clinton/Russia connection”. You’re not seeing things, Dana Rohrabacher is insisting that the real story that everyone is missing is that Russia was working through the Clinton Foundation to help Hillary win the election by hacking her own party, and releasing as much damaging information as they could online about her. Dana Rohrabacher also gave a bats*** interview to the San Francisco Chronicle where, as he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, proceeded to explain how the events that unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia and the terror attack carried out by a white supremacist there were actually a false flag operation set up by liberals and Democrats who are loyal to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
And, you may have seen recently how Rohrabacher also provided some unintentional entertainment in July 2018, as he was featured as one of a group of Republicans who were duped by comedian Sasha Baren Cohen to be recorded advocating for a promotional campaign to sell firearms to toddlers.
And as completely unhinged as all of those moments are, Rep. Rohrabacher’s voting record is pretty nutty as well:
- February 16th, 2017: Rohrabacher votes for HJR 69, to make it legal for hunters on wildlife reserves to kill several species of hibernating bears or wolves while they’re sleeping. Because… well, the logic really isn’t there as to why, it’s just awful.
- March 16th, 2017: Dana Rohrabacher votes for HR 1181, which would allow veterans deemed mentally incompetent to continue to own firearms, and not have them taken away without a judge’s written order. We feel safer already.
- March 28th, 2017: Rep. Rohrabacher votes for SJ Res 34, which allowed internet providers to sell the data information of their customers’ internet usage to businesses. Well, so much for privacy.
- May 4th, 2017: Rohrabacher votes for the House GOP’s healthcare plan, that would kick roughly 24 million people off their health insurance plans, allow up to 28,000 more people to die a year, give $50,000 in tax breaks to millionaires, and would eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions which would include such medical conditions as pregnancy (current or past), postpartum depression, or prior sexual assault. Oh, and a provision in the bill would make sure that Rohrabacher would be allowed to keep his healthcare plan as it exists under the ACA, which would be repealed for the rest of the country. He and his Republican compatriots threw themselves a beer bash to celebrate taking away healthcare from millions and then gloated about it with Donald Trump at a White House press conference, as well.
- June 8th, 2017: Dana Rohrabacher votes for HR 10, the GOP’s attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform, because what the country really needs is to allow the big banks to make the same mistakes that imploded the economy only a decade earlier.
- October 3rd, 2017: Rohrabacher votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks (even though medical science tells us fetuses do not have the capability to feel pain until 29 weeks).
- December 19th, 2017: Dana Rohrabacher votes for HR 1, the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.
- February 18th, 2018: Rohrabacher and his fellow Republicans decide that poor big businesses are suffering too much at the hands of the Americans with Disabilities Act too much, and votes for HR 620, which would strip most of the civil rights protections guaranteed by it.
Now, one of the things we’ve been keeping track of in our updates on members of Congress is how their town halls have gone in 2017. Interesting thing about Dana Rohrabacher… he’s decided to not host one. Well, maybe that would just look cowardly, but when you see reports that Rohrabacher accused constituents showing up at his office in his district asking him to host one of “political thuggery, pure and simple”, and labeling them “enemies of democracy”:
“Though the protesters think of themselves as idealists, they engaged in political thuggery, pure and simple. These people do not want, as they’ve claimed, to hold a town hall meeting with me. These are unruly activists on whom the lessons of civility and democratic participation have been lost. These holier-than-thou obstructionists will be held responsible for this outrageous assault. They are exposing themselves for what they are — enemies of American self-government and democracy.”
His relationship with his constituents has devolved to the point where, quite literally, Rep. Rohrabacher has called the police on activists for daring to call his office and ask him questions. There was also the moment in May of 2018 where Rohrabacher argued in favor of housing discrimination against the LGBTQ community, losing endorsements from the National Association of Realtors, who weren’t down with that homophobic bulls***. California’s 48th Congressional District, for the record, has only a +4 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That gives Rohrabacher’s challenger in November, Harley Rouda, more than a chance of ending the three-decade long career of Rohrabacher, and here’s hoping that among all the dirtbags swept out of Washington during the 2018 Blue Wave, that an old “surfer” like Rohrabacher gets to wipe out in the face of it.