When President Barack Obama was speaking to the United States on Tuesday evening about Syria from the East Room of the White House, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Texas) was somewhere between the House and Senate chambers, leading a tour of the Capitol.
Gohmert, a five-term congressman from Texas’s first congressional district, hasn’t exactly endeared himself to D.C.’s political elite. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank introduced Gohmert in a Wednesday article with the descriptor "eccentric." Politico’s media blogger Dylan Byers ran a piece on Monday titled "Bachmann, Gohmert, King's bizarre Egypt statement." And that’s just in the last week.
He is occasionally a bit outrageous. He once accused Attorney General Eric Holder of casting "aspersions on my asparagus." Liberals and the media pounced.
But when the group of about 25 people gathered for the tour on the southeast steps of the Capitol, there were no cynical or snarky comments. There was respect for the man and excitement for the tour. For at least a couple people, this was not their first tour with Gohmert.
Among those who have heard about them, these tours are legendary. An email from Gohmert’s assistant to the group said the tour could last until 11:30 pm. We met her at the Capitol at 7:15. Typical tours take under an hour.
But then again, Congressman Gohmert isn’t your typical tour guide. Only a few congressmen actually give their own tours, Gohmert told me. Fewer tour guides have the depth of knowledge of the Capitol that Gohmert has. And fewer still have the access to the Capitol that he gave the group.
The tour began with Gohmert taking the group onto the floor of the House of Representatives. He let us sit in the first couple of rows of seats as he stood between two lecterns and talked to us, still wearing his buttoned black suit jacket and occasionally running his hand over his bald pate. He explained some of the mechanics of his job: where people sit, what walls light up showing how the representatives have voted, how he casts his vote.
Someone asked Gohmert if there is anywhere in the Capitol that he hasn’t been. "The crawl space underneath," he said, shrugging.
Gohmert’s explained to the group the origin of a hole in the ceiling of the House Chamber (a bullet hole from when Puerto Rican nationalists stormed the room), where a fresco by "the only classically trained fresco painter in America" at the time used to be in the House and why it was gone, and the origin of partisan seating arrangements in the House (it came from the British House of Commons).
He told us about Nancy Reagan’s objection to the sculptor of her husband’s statue having put a vent in his suit jacket, pointed out where Abraham Lincoln sat in the old House chamber, and explained, in great detail, how John Quincy Adams influenced Lincoln’s fight against slavery. He also told us why Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire has a different desk from all the other senators while we were standing next to the desk on the Senate floor.
Gohmert, like any good politician, knew his audience. He explained how the marble podium that used to be at the front of the House chamber—the one from which Franklin Roosevelt gave his "day which will live in infamy" speech—was lost for many years before turning up in Bonham, Texas, a small town in east Texas near the Oklahoma border.
Gohmert could make this connection because he spends so much time with his constituents.
"It’s rare that I’ve heard that he’s in town and he’s not at an event," one woman from Tyler, Texas, told me in an interview the day after the tour. "He is very much in the community."
This community outreach has resulted in solid personal and electoral popularity. Gohmert won over 70 percent of the vote in 2012. He won over 60 percent of the vote in 2004 when he first ran for Congress and beat the Democratic incumbent. About a thousand people came to Gohmert’s annual birthday party over the August recess, said Paul Powell, Gohmert’s former pastor at the large Green Acres Baptist Church.
Gohmert is one of the most conservative members of Congress. The conservative Club for Growth gave him a 97 percent score for 2012, and Heritage Action put him as one of the most conservative members of the Texas delegation.
"He’s very conservative, but he lives in a conservative district," Powell told me.
"It really doesn’t matter what the Washington Post says about him," the woman from Tyler quipped at one point.
"We believe in right and wrong, and the Bible," Powell said about the district. "We believe in balanced budgets. We believe in small government, by and large."
Gohmert’s Bible permeated the tour. Around the top of the House chamber are pictures of great lawmakers throughout history, and the only one whose picture is not in profile is Moses, in the center of the back of the room, staring down at the speaker’s chair. Gohmert riffed on efforts to remove references to the Ten Commandments from courtrooms before concluding about Moses, "Anyway, some of us still think he’s the greatest lawgiver of all time."
Gohmert spoke as though he could see God meddling in America’s history. He noted happy coincidences in America’s past, such as the British leaving Washington during the War of 1812 because of storms or Abraham Lincoln’s one-term tenure in the House allowing him to hear John Quincy Adams preach passionately against slavery. And he fiercely defended the reputation of George Washington as a Christian leader against those who have questioned his piety—quoting Washington at length.
"Our history is just full of all kinds of different examples of things that look like providence," Gohmert told us.
Gohmert’s knowledge of American history and the Capitol’s details border on encyclopedic.
The tiles of the floor in one part of the Capitol are made of china from London, Gohmert noted at one point. The building’s architect was worried that the company might go bankrupt, leaving the Capitol without any replacements, so Congress bought some replacements. Gohmert knew the price of the tiles, both the originals and the replacements.
During the tour, Gohmert occasionally made jabs at the Obama administration—at the White House for stopping its visitor tours, at Michelle Obama for telling students what they should eat—the press, and the Supreme Court. But throughout the tour Gohmert stayed focused on the history that took place in the building.
Gohmert ended his tour in the old Supreme Court chamber, describing John Quincy Adams’ days-long oral argument in a case over the freedom of Africans transported across the Atlantic to be slaves. Adams ultimately appealed to the justices’ conscience before God as the reason that they should grant the Africans freedom.
"We’ve got a great history, don’t we?" he concluded.
"Amen," a woman called out.
Gohmert then walked the group back up the stairs and outside, where he shook everyone’s hand and made sure they knew where to go.
It was 10:30 p.m., more than three hours after the tour began. President Obama had been done speaking for over an hour.