Welcome to what is the 798th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where we’ll be taking a look at the sitting U.S. House Representative from Florida’s 12th Congressional District, Gus Bilrakis, who has held office since 2006, jumping in to be a legacy and take over where his father Michael Bilirakis to serve three terms in Florida’s 9th Congressional District before jumping to the 12th District from 2013 to the present. Prior to that, Bilrakis served in the Florida House of Representatives for four terms from 1999-2007.
Now, part of how Gus Bilirakis caught our attention was the day he hosted a women’s summit, that featured an agenda with key topics such as “weight loss” and “gardening” that are relevant to their interests. Perhaps that has a lot to do with why Bilirakis has a long, long history of voting against women’s issues, not just his pathological series of anti-choice votes, but the fact that he’s voted against every equal pay bill that’s come across his path the entire time he’s been in Congress.
Bilirakis is also a climate change denialist to the extend that he defended Donald Trump’s hair-brained decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords, and did so by citing a highly flawed study that claimed 2.7 million jobs would be lost if the United States honored the agreement.
But what troubled us the most as we dug deeper into recent statements by Gus Bilirakis was his town hall in February of 2017. His constituents were highly alarmed that the GOP-controlled Congress and Trump administration might move to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and leave tens of millions stripped of their health insurance. So what was Bilirakis’ response? He decided to begin babbling about “death panels”. Y’know, the same “death panels” that Republicans fear-mongered about in 2009 and 2010 to fear-monger about the Affordable Care Act that NEVER CAME TO BE when the law got passed. The same “death panels” that were named Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” eight years earlier. And for that, Bilirakis was booed out of his own town hall.
If only the voters of Florida’s 12th Congressional District might cease to re-elect this hack, and he wouldn’t have a voting record like this:
- November 7th, 2007: Gus Bilirakis votes against ENDA, allowing the continued discrimination of LGBTQ citizens based on their sexual identity in the workplace.
- January 9th, 2009: Bilirakis votes against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
- April 29th, 2009: Gus Bilirakis votes against the Hate Crimes Expansion that would provide protections to LGBTQ citizens.
- June 30th, 2010: After Wall Street bankers taking unnecessary risks nearly imploded the global economy in 2007, legislation finally comes forward to prevent the same behaviors from being permitted in the future. The signature piece of legislation to prevent another financial meltdown was Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, which Gus Bilirakis voted against.
- July 30th, 2010: Months after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a bill comes to the floor to better regulate off-shore drilling. Bilirakis is apparently alright with ecological disasters continuing in the future, as he votes against it.
- December 8th, 2010: Rep. Bilirakis votes against the DREAM Act.
- December 15th, 2010: Bilirakis votes against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
- On January 5th, 2011, Rep. Bilirakis votes the first attempt by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
- On February 18th, 2011, Gus Bilirakis votes to defund Planned Parenthood.
- September 15th, 2012: Rep. Bilirakis votes for the “No More Solyndras Act”.
- January 15th, 2013: Gus Bilirakis votes against Disaster Relief Funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
- February 28th, 2013: Bilirakis votes against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
- September 30th, 2013: Rep. Bilirakis votes for the 2013 Government Shutdown.
- Feb 26th, 2014: Gus Bilirakis goes “all in” on the faux-scandal surrounding the IRS researching SuperPACs by voting for the “Stop the Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act”.
- January 22nd, 2015: Gus Bilirakis votes for HR 7, an anti-abortion bill that makes even some Republicans pause before voting for it because of its language that tries to define the conditions for what “rape” is, in it.
- March 3rd, 2015: Bilirakis votes against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a Republican protest of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
- September 11th, 2015: Bilirakis votes against the United States’ nuclear treaty with Iran.
- September 18th, 2015: Rep. Bilirakis votes for a bill with most House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, based on highly edited “sting” videos submitted by a Pro-Life advocacy group that have been repeatedly debunked by investigators.
- November 19th, 2015: Bilirakis votes for the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, reacting to the terror attacks in Paris by jihadists from France and Belgium by trying to create greater restrictions to keep out Syrian refugees, of whom exactly zero were involved in those attacks.
- February 2nd, 2016: Gus Bilirakis votes for HR 3762, the 61st attempt by Congressional Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which is still working better than was predicted).
- February 16th, 2017: Bilirakis votes for HJR 69, to make it legal for hunters on wildlife reserves to kill several species of hibernating bears or wolves while they’re sleeping.
- March 16th, 2017: Gus Bilirakis votes for HR 1181, which would allow veterans deemed mentally incompetent to continue to own firearms, and not have them taken away without a judge’s written order.
- May 4th, 2017: Bilirakis votes for the GOP’s healthcare plan, that would allow 24,000 more people to die a year, give $50,000 in tax breaks to millionaires, would eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions, and would treat pregnancy, post-partum depression, and sexual assault as “pre-existing conditions”. Oh, and a provision in the bill would make sure that Bilirakis would be allowed to keep his healthcare plan as it exists under the ACA, which would be repealed for the rest of the country. He and his Republican compatriots threw themselves a beer bash to celebrate taking away healthcare from millions and then gloated about it with Donald Trump at a White House press conference, as well.
- June 8th, 2017: Gus Bilirakis votes for HR 10, the GOP’s attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform, because what the country really needs is to allow the big banks to make the same mistakes that imploded the economy only a decade earlier.
- October 3rd, 2017: Bilirakis votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks (even though medical science tells us fetuses do not have the capability to feel pain until 29 weeks).
- December 19th, 2017: Gus Bilirakis votes for HR 1, the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.
- February 18th, 2018: Rep. Bilirakis and his fellow Republicans decide that poor big businesses are suffering too much at the hands of the Americans with Disabilities Act too much, and vote for HR 620, which would strip most of the civil rights protections guaranteed by it.
- January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Bilirakis voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
- February 28th, 2019: Bilirakis votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
- March 14th, 2019: Rep. Bilirakis votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
- April 4th, 2019: Gus Bilirakis is one of 158 Republicans who choose to vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
- May 17th, 2019: Bilirakis votes against The Equality Act, which would have prevented discrimination towards Americans based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
- June 4th, 2019: Rep. Bilirakis votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.
- July 16th, 2019: Gus Bilirakis votes against a resolution to condemn Donald Trump for his racist statements that four people of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”.
We’re waiting to see what happens in Florida’s 12th Congressional District in 2020, and how the Trump impeachment hearings play out… because the district has only a +8 Republican lean. It’s possible that if Bilirakis stays loyal to an obviously corrupt president, that he might end up facing the consequences at the polls in 2020, before he can get an eighth term in office.
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