"Once you move marriage beyond the scope of a man and a woman, you really don't end up with a good place to put a limit," Gohmert, R-Texas, said, adding: "I think polygamy is wrong, bigamy is wrong, and it's a crime in many places -- but how will that be justifiable now that the court has removed this? There's some [who] believe polygamy is a way to go."

h/t the Huffington Post.

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Gohmert steered clear of his old standbys of anti-gay rights panic while talking to the press, instead saying, rather somberly, that gay marriage in the United States signals the "end of a great civilization" and scolding the high court for going against "the laws of nature and nature's God."

Embedding on the video has been disabled, but you can watch the full thing here.

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He continued that "there is a natural law that parents should be involved in education," but this "reminds me so much of the summer that I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union back in the Seventies and I was shocked when they were saying 'no, the children don't belong to parents, they belong to the state.' And if any parent said anything in front of their children negative about the wonderful Soviet Union, then we will take their children away and give them to somebody more deserving."

Here's the audio, via Right Wing Watch:

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After it was explained to him that the measure would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment practices based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Gohmert told a reporter from ThinkProgress: "Who wants to go talking about sexual orientation when they’re working? Good grief."

"Talking about sexual orientation" at work can be just that -- openly discussing one's life and family -- and it shouldn't be cause to reject a qualified candidate or fire an employee, which is why a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are pushing to pass ENDA in the first place.

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So who will be the next Bachmann -- both a hero to the right and villain to the left? We asked Tea Party and conservative activists, as well as the liberal operatives and bloggers who loved to hate her (and love to watch their traffic numbers and fundraising dollars spike when they write about her). Everyone agreed that Bachmann is probably irreplaceable. She was an unequaled lightning rod and cash cow, both for herself and for Democratic groups that used her name as a shorthand for everything wrong with the GOP in email solicitations, so she leaves big shoes to fill.

You probably already know Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Steve King and some others, but here's our best guess about names you might not know but will start seeing more often at places like both CPAC and MSNBC, in no particular order:

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Zink knows the harm such restrictions can inflict on women faced with this choice because she was one of them. At 21 weeks, her doctors informed her that her fetus had no brain function and would very likely not survive the pregnancy; it was an abnormality that could not have been detected earlier in her pregnancy, as she told the committee:

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"Thank goodness that the IRS was not around to help the founders when they founded the country, or otherwise they'd [have] probably shot the Boston Tea Party participants," he said. "They would have killed off over half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and this country would've never gotten started."

Watch, via Raw Story:

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Gohmert was speaking with the Daily Caller, and laid out his full theory:

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"Let me ask you, if you're sitting in your home and you know there are only two possibilities for people coming to your door," Gohmert said, "one is law enforcement and the other is somebody who has already killed Americans and continues to do so, how many rounds do you want to be limited to in your magazine as you sit in your chair and wait?"

Watch, via Right Wing Watch:

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Speaking on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Gohmert, R-Texas, said: "We know Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border. We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic [sic] when they are radical Islamists. We know these things are happening. It is just insane not to protect ourselves, and make sure that people come in as most people do ... They want the freedoms we have."

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Double entendres ensue:

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On March 13 around 11 p.m., Politico reports, Gohmert was cited for parking his SUV in a spot meant for the National Park Service.

From Politico:

But Gohmert wasn’t having it: He told the Park Police that his congressional parking placard allows him to park in that spot, and he’s on the committee that oversees the agency.

Gohmert took the ticket off his windshield and placed it on a police car along with his business card with a written message: “Oversight of Park Service is my job! Natural Resources Thus the Congressional Plate in window.”

One of the officers described Gohmert as "ranting."

According to the police report, Gohmert told the officers: "I left my business card with the ticket and I am not paying for a ticket," though it is unclear whether or not he did.

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As Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing explains: "For the record, here's how it works: Google parses the email for keywords, checks to see if anyone has bid to have text-ads displayed on emails with those words, and displays ads that match. Here's how Gohmert thinks they work: A computer at Google reads your email, sends your identity to an advertiser, and asks it if it wants to display ads on your email."

Gohmert questioned the Google lawyer present at the hearing, and it did not go very well. Here's a sample from the exchange:

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That's why it's so fun to read this Betsy Woodruff story about how Texas congressman Louie Gohmert is being treated like a rock star at CPAC. Because Louie Gohmert is not just a nutjob -- he is a singularly useless and unaccomplished nutjob. The man has been in the House of Representatives since 2005 and in all that time all he's done is generate hundreds of outraged blog posts.

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Gohmert was speaking on a panel called "Too Many American Wars? Should We Fight Anywhere and Can We Afford It?", and began by stating that "Vietnam was winnable, but people in Washington decided we should not win it." He added that the "lesson" of Vietnam is that "you don't send American men and women into harm's way unless you're gonna give them what they need" to win.

Gohmert blamed Jimmy Carter for many of America's current foreign policy problems, referring to the Iranian hostage crisis, and pointing to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: "I still believe today that we have Americans dying for their country because we did not send a message in 1979 that you do not attack Atcmerican soil."

The rest of the members of the panel agreed, including Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who pointed to America's "tendancy to end wars indecisively," and "America's political leadership being too sophisticated and focusing on things like exit strategies, as opposed to victory strategies."

Dr. Ivan Eland, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, noted that "we've shown the people how to beat us."

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On the "Dennis Miller Show," guest host Larry O’Connor asked Gohmert about Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who commented yesterday: "I really don’t know why people need assault weapons.”

"Why would anyone need an assault weapon as they’re defining it?" O'Connor asked.

"I refuse to play the game of 'assault weapon,'" Gohmert said. "That’s any weapon. It’s a hammer. It’s the machetes. In Rwanda that killed 800,000 people, an article came out this week, the massive number that are killed with hammers. Homemade bombs, those kinds of things. The issue is why should you have the right to bear arms, why should you have the right to free speech even though I don't like what you're saying?"

Here's the audio, via ThinkProgress:

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One problem was a lack of leadership. If, say, Eric Cantor had actually wanted the job, he could've organized the coup and succeeded. But Eric Cantor didn't want the job. The bigger problem, then, was a lack of intelligence. The crazy caucus failed spectacularly at all aspects of the attempted conspiracy, from planning to execution. They waited until the last minute to approach potential allies, failed to count their own votes correctly, and didn't even all figure out who they were supposed to vote for instead. Their plan was apparently to embarrass Boehner into resigning, in favor of ... someone to be decided later. Candidates voted for by plotters included departing Rep. Allen West and former Comptroller David Walker, who are basically the opposites of one another.

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These fear-mongers won’t be able to spread their hysteria from the bully pulpit of a House seat any longer. But that doesn’t mean that the House Republican caucus has rid themselves of the scourge of anti-Muslim politicians who stoke that sentiment for political gain. On the contrary, the House Republican caucus remains the place where the ugly head of Islamophobia rests comfortably.

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It began with Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who said that he wished principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed during the shooting. "I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out ... and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids." This is nothing new for Gohmert: He floated a similar idea after the shootings in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.: “Well, it does make me wonder, you know with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying that could’ve stopped this guy more quickly?”

Gun rights activists (and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who said at a Tea Party meeting: “You should be able to carry your handgun anywhere in this state" if you have a permit) quickly reiterated Gohmert's point.

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But among elected Republicans, so far it's been mostly radio silence.

On Sunday, David Gregory of Meet the Press said that all of the pro-gun rights senators refused to appear on the show. “A note here this morning: We reached out to all 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new Congress to invite them on the program to share their views on the subject this morning,” he said. ”We had no takers.”

And few have addressed the issue since then.

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