But there is a key difference in Stockman’s second act, and it says less about him than about our politics. Back then, he proved too much even for the ’94 revolutionaries; his classmates came to shun him and voters in his competitive district sent him packing. But this time, Texas has redrawn its political boundaries, and Stockman’s new seat is safe. What’s more, his views, outlandish in the House of 1995, are more at home in the House of 2013. On Tuesday night, Stockman was one of 179 House Republicans to vote against aid to Hurricane Sandy's victims.
All these years later, Stockman can still bring the crazy. The problem is he’s now just one of many purveyors.
In his first few days back, Stockman has picked up where he left off. In addition to his threat to seek impeachment of President Obama if he issues executive orders on guns, he voted “present” rather than cast his ballot to elect John Boehner speaker, complaining that the Republican leader cooperated with “a liberal White House that has outmaneuvered him at every turn.” He also introduced legislation that would end gun-free zones around schools.
By his own account, Stockman spent time homeless as a young man, sleeping in a Fort Worth park, looking for food in trash cans and going by the street name “Max.” He has been jailed more than once, he has said in interviews, and was charged with a felony after one such incident when authorities found Valium in his pants; he said a girlfriend put the pills there, and the charge was later reduced.
Soon after his out-of-nowhere victory in ’94, and a few weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing, he wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno about a fanciful raid on a militia group he thought the feds were planning — saying that “reliable sources” had informed him “a paramilitary-style attack against Americans” would occur at 4 a.m. on either March 25 or 26. The paranoia continued when he wrote in Guns & Ammo that the federal government “executed” the Branch Davidians because “they owned guns that the government did not wish them to have” and so the Clinton administration could “prove the need for a ban on so-called ‘assault weapons.’ ”
In his brief but glorious term, Stockman established daily prayer meetings in his office and tangled with the Anti-Defamation League for speaking on a radio program of a group that the ADL called anti-Semitic. Midway through his term, he launched an effort to investigate the first Kinsey Report and to cut off federal funding for sex-education programs that might be based on the landmark study.
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