Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Sunday asserted that the Republican obsession with repealing President Barack Obama's health care reform law and threatening to shut down the government if it was not defunded was the same process that the country used to create a Constitution.
ABC News host George Stephanopolous noted that President Barack Obama had said last week that Republicans "have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number one priority, the one unifying principle."
"That's a false narrative," Gohmert insisted. "He said, we're trying to keep people from having health care. That's just not true. That is an absolute, blatant lie. We are not trying to keep anybody from getting health care."
"At this point, Louie, it's just ideology, it's just extreme ideology," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) observed.
Conservative columnist George Will also advised Gohmert against shutting down the government because "the narrative will be that Republicans have chosen simply to cause chaos, and I think it's a bad idea."
"I do think that even though that we're one half legislating body that from which no spending occurs unless we agree, that is a position that allows us to force others to adhere to the Constitution," Gohmert opined. "We don't have to wait for the Supreme Court, we can force that. We can say, you're going to abide by the Constitution, whether the Supreme Court gets it wrong or right. We have the ability to force respect for the law, and some of us think that we ought to force them to do that."
"First of all, it is the law of the land," Castro pointed out. "You know, the Congress passed it, the president signed it, and a conservative Supreme Court upheld it, Louie. I mean, it is the law of the land."
"You need to also remember -- and I think that Lyndon Johnson said it -- if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary," Gohmert quipped. "It's good to have a good disagreement. That's how we got to the Constitution."
