Freedom Caucus member Louie Gohmert sympathizes with the parts of the country that panicked and just wanted the American Health Care Act to pass, flawed as it was, he admitted Wednesday.
“I agree the time is now. We need to do it now,” Gohmert said on C-Span. “But to pass a bill that was going to bring up the premium rates, my concern was the premium rates and hurting people, and not growing the government.”
The Texas representative pushed back on the idea that The Freedom Caucus was unreasonably purist in its demands.
“We were not purist twice,” he explained. “We agreed with the president, thought we had a deal, and then Republican leadership would come in and say you can’t do that.”
“My constituents can’t stand higher rates,” Gohmert said in response to the prediction that rates would go up for a while under the Obamacare replacement. “Gosh, you know, we’ll hold our nose and vote for some of these bad provisions if we can just be certain the premiums are coming down.”
The GOP would have lost the majority in 2018 and President Trump politically impeached in 2019 “in a witch hunt” if the American Health Care Act had passed, Gohmert argued.
Gohmert said he disagrees with the solution floated by some of his peers to give the Health and Human Services Department more power later to bring premiums down.
Although he said he trusts Secretary of HHS Tom Price, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to give more power to the federal government.”
Gohmert spoke more passionately when the interviewer brought up a scathing article written by a doctor who knows Gohmert.
“This country is going to hell in a handbasket,” Gohmert insisted.
“And if people like me don’t stand up we will continue to have the federal government get bigger and bigger, invade people’s privacy, take away their decision-making authority more and more, and Republicans who are supposed to rein that in will keep going along and getting along.”
Gohmert said he sees himself as the “conscience” of the Republican party and says he will not stop being so as long as he part of Congress.
“Look I understand,” the congressman assured. “My late mother loved poetry, and I saw this as that choice Robert Frost talked about when he said: ‘And I shall be saying this with a sigh. Somewhere ages and ages hence, two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.'”
