Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is bucking fellow conservatives' support for
favored speaker of the House candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, telling
Newsmax TV the Wisconsin lawmaker's voting history is a "problem."
In an interview Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show," Gohmert acknowledges his decision to not vote for Ryan "may put me in the crazy category for some people."
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"But I analyzed the situation and I came out in support of [Florida GOP Rep.] Dan Webster not because he has a voting record as conservative as mine — because he doesn't," Gohmert said.
"But he is the only person I know who has been a speaker of the House and has done the almost unthinkable act of taking power away from himself and restoring it to the members."
Webster served as the first Republican speaker of the Florida House since Reconstruction before coming to Congress in 2010.
"It's only when the members of Congress are allowed to have authority and power that they can adequately represent their own constituents," Gohmert added. " We haven't had that authority under [outgoing Speaker of the House John] Boehner. Nobody could get a committee they wanted without his okay, or a chairmanship that they wanted without his okay."
Gohmert compared that situation with a dictatorship.
"If we let our committees run themselves and let the members elect their own committee chairman, for example, and restore power back to the members instead of having a dictator — I mean let's face it, if we're going to have a dictator of the Republican Party, we've got to have somebody really incredibly good if they're going to make all the decisions for all of us who represent over 700,000 people," he said.
But Gohmert said that wasn't the main stumbling block for his decision to not vote for Ryan.
"My trouble is not with any of the promises that have been made, and it's certainly not with Paul's intellect or ability," he said, adding the issue is with "his history."
"As far as it appeared to me, he was the leading proponent for the Wall Street bailout in either party and either House, and I was trying to convince people not to vote for it and he was much more persuasive getting people to get on board," he said. "That's the problem."
In October 2008, the Democrat-controlled Congress approved a $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program; Ryan was among 91 Republicans who voted yes,
according to fact-checker Politifact.
Ryan's vote earned him a demerit from the American Conservative Union, according to Politifact.
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