The top staffer in the office of Rep. Louie Gohmert denied an anonymous claim that employees in the lawmaker’s D.C. office were berated for wearing masks and forced to work in dangerous conditions.
“We have never discouraged anyone from wearing a mask,” Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, told the Washington Examiner.
An anonymous Gohmert staffer emailed Politico and made the claims, the media outlet reported Wednesday, hours after the Texas Republican tested positive for the coronavirus. The alleged tipster wrote, “Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that we could be an example to America on how to open up safely. When probing the office, you might want to ask how often people are berated for wearing masks.”
Hair said that Gohmert’s office remains fully staffed while Congress is in session and cuts back to one employee when not in session. Nobody in the office has shown symptoms of any illness, and Gohmert remains asymptomatic, she said.
“We don’t have non-essential personnel,” Hair said. “We don’t hire people we don’t need. When the House is in session, we have partitions and cubicles in the back where staff can work.”
House Democrats voted earlier this year to permit proxy voting and conduct hearings remotely. The Senate does not permit proxy voting.
Some lawmakers in the House and Senate have cut back on in-person staffing, allowing employees to work from home or rotating the people who work from the D.C. office.
Some Capitol reporters have become increasingly involved in policing the safety standards in the Capitol and have criticized lawmakers they spot without wearing their masks.
On Wednesday, Politico reporter Jake Sherman wrote a string of tweets starting with the anonymous Gohmert staffer’s email and then said Gohmert is putting lives at risk for questioning masks and making “their entire office work in person in the middle of a pandemic.”
Sherman called on the Capitol to conduct mandatory testing because some lawmakers “can’t be relied on to follow basic masking rules,” and he thanked a colleague for pointing out the mandatory testing requirement on the PGA Tour.
Gohmert started wearing a mask a few weeks ago, Hair said, but pulls it down when speaking or walking apart from others.
