The Slatest

Louie Gohmert: The GOP Leaders Who Hate Me Can Get Rid of Me With This One Easy Trick

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (L), seen here greeting Glenn Beck at a Washington D.C. rally opposing the Iran nuclear deal on September 9, 2015, says he’d be willing to give up his seat in Congress to get his way on the Iran deal.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert has vowed to give GOP leadership in the House of Representatives what they want most, “and that’s for me not to run for Congress again.” All they have to do, he says, is go along with his plan for how to handle the nuclear deal with Iran.

Gohmert reached out to Glenn Beck earlier this week, ahead of the rally in Washington D.C. where they both appeared to denounce the Iran nuclear deal, sending an email laying out an idea to use the only thing left Gohmert can tempt top Republicans with—the promise of his absence—to entice his party’s leaders to get on board with the Gohmert Plan for countering the Iran deal. According to Beck: 

I just got an email from Louie Gohmert. He said, “Last week I announced to the world if the House and Senate will treat Iran—the Iran treaty as a treaty, I will not run for my congressional seat again. It’s the only thing that I have left that our leadership wants beside my integrity. And after last week that I spent in Egypt, I feel so compelled to do absolutely everything I can to derail this president’s drastic move towards a nuclear holocaust. I won’t run again if the House voted on my attached resolution and the Senate voted on ratification.”

Gohmert’s favored approach—attempting to brand the agreement a treaty—could, in theory, compel the senate to vote to ratify it, which Gohmert maintains is required under the Constitution. The argument to count the agreement as a treaty is not being made only by Gohmert: “This is clearly a treaty. They can call it a banana, but it’s a treaty,” Republican Sen. John McCain said of the deal, accordng to CNN.

If top Republicans don’t adopt Gohmert’s approach, they could come to regret it, he told KPTV in an interview Tuesday:

If they continue this course, of just playing a game, and saying, ‘We voted to disapprove it in the House and Senate,’ instead of bringing it up as the Constitution requires, for ratification, I will run again and again as long as the people of East Texas allow me. And I will be the biggest pain in the neck, and other places, of the Republican leadership, until we get leadership that will follow the Constitution.

Gohmert, who last fall garnered only three votes in his bid to unseat John Boehner as House Speaker, has made previous forays into international relations. He traveled with fellow conservative Reps. Michele Bachmann and Steve King to Egypt in 2013 to extoll the virtues of Western democracy in the wake of brutal military crackdowns on the population.