Why is Louie Gohmert really entering the race for Texas Attorney General?

| 11:24 pm EST November 22, 2021
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Whenever one of the dumber Republican characters makes a curious move, there’s often a tendency on our side to see who can assign the cleverest motivation to that move. But in reality, dumb people usually do dumb things just because they’re dumb, and those dumb moves usually just fail accordingly, without there having been any secret evil genius plan behind it all. Speaking of dumb people, this brings us to Louie Gohmert.

House Republican Louie Gohmert isn’t faking it; he really is as dumb and whacked out as he comes across. Tonight he decided to enter the 2022 race for Attorney General of Texas, and everyone is trying to figure out why. There’s a presumption that since Gohmert is doing this, he must have a viable plan to win. But let’s be real, nothing about Gohmert suggests he has a coherent plan when it comes to anything.

First of all, Texas already has a Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton. He filed some fraudulent legal cases to try to make Donald Trump feel better about his humiliating 2020 election loss, and for all we know, Paxton could still end up facing legal trouble for it. But as things currently stand, Paxton is indeed seeking reelection, and there’s no reason to think he’d lose a Republican primary challenge to Gohmert. After all, Gohmert is a weirdo from an oddball district who’s mainly survived all these years merely out of incumbency, and it’s hard to imagine he’d prove to be as popular statewide in Texas as he is in his own longtime district.

So there’s good reason to think Gohmert wouldn’t even make it past the Republican primary, let alone a general election where he’d be an inept gaffe-a-minute candidate who would make such a mess for himself, he could potentially lose to the right Democratic candidate.

The question is why Gohmert is even doing this, given that he’s likely to lose the primary race, and that he might not win the election even if he does win the nomination. The bigger question is why Gohmert would risk losing his safe seat in the House in order to pursue this. After all, if he stays in the Texas Attorney General race long enough, at some point he’ll have to give up on seeking reelection in the House. As a practical matter, you probably can’t realistically pursue both these races all the way to the finish line.

That’s why we won’t be surprised if Louie Gohmert’s decision to run for Texas Attorney General ends up being a short lived one, once he quickly realizes his weak odds of winning, and decides to drop out and cling to his House seat instead. But if Gohmert does end up taking the Texas AG race seriously and stays in it for the long haul, the question will be why he’s throwing his House seat away on such a low percentage gamble.

Maybe Gohmert is just tired of being in the House (he’s been there sixteen years), and so he doesn’t care if he loses his seat in the process. Or maybe Gohmert is running from something. It’s now fairly clear that the January 6th Committee will end up subpoenaing him and a handful other House Republicans under threat of criminal contempt charges, and perhaps he’s under the mistaken impression that running for Texas Attorney General will somehow magically save him from this fate (it won’t). Or maybe Gohmert, an incoherent dummy without a clue, is just doing something incoherently dumb for no explainable reason. One wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Gohmert changes his mind next week and announces that he’s running for King.