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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Jason Smith- 2023 Update [1]

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Date: 2023-08-21

On this date in both 2020, 2021, as well 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing the sitting U.S. House Representative from Missouri’s 8th District, Jason Smith, who was first elected to Congress back in 2012 after serving eight years as a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Our interest in profiling Rep. Smith began as far back as 2016, when during a sit-in led by the legendary Congressman John Lewis where Democrats sat on the House floor because Republicans were stubborn enough on gun laws to hold up legislation that would have prevented those on the terror watch list from buying guns. Smith deemed that “ridiculous”, and claiming they were “politicizing a very horrible tragedy” in the Pulse massacre to stage their protest.



It was in early 2019, though, once his party became the minority in the House that we really saw who Jason Smith is. Our country was weeks into the longest government shutdown in its history, engineered by Smith and the GOP. And as House Democrats began working to undo the mess Smith deliberately created, he screamed, “Go back to Puerto Rico!”at California Congressman Tony Cardenas. Smith’s Chief of Staff claimed the comment was directed at Democrats who were “vacationing in Puerto Rico” the prior week, when the reality is, they were there still assessing the island’s recovery almost two years after Hurricane Maria struck and the Trump administration’s lack of a response.



By the end of that year, Smith was criticizing Democrats’ attempts to impeach Donald Trump for soliciting Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, calling it a “circus”:

If the above quote wasn’t a clear indicator that Jason Smith is completely in the tank for Donald Trump, in spite of his rampant corruption and incompetence, in March of 2020, as Trump was ignoring the threat of Covid-19 as it began spreading throughout the United States, Smith lectured Democrats that Trump “deserved more praise” because of what Trump was doing to protect American farmers from China (when Trump’s policies were sending more farmers into bankruptcy and there was a statistical rise in farmer suicides).



If only it were that he had developed into a partisan cheap-shot artist, and not that he also voted against the interests of the American people as a legislator:

Jason Smith won re-election in 2022 with 76% of the vote, in spite of him demonstrating he doesn’t understand how the debt ceiling works on social media, or that failing to raise it would cripple not just the American economy, but the global economy. It’s just not possible that anyone could be this rock stupid and be able to put their shoes on everyday, he knows he’s lying when he says things like the Inflation Reduction Act is just “the Inflation Act” and that it’s somehow “welfare for the wealthy” what it literally is paid for with higher taxes upon the wealthiest Americans. Or how he pushed back against its original form, Build Back Better, by claiming it provided a tax break for the 1%, when that’s precisely the opposite of how that would play out.



It's really that he’s just the sort of legislative nihilist that makes him easily identifiable as a modern Republican…. Outright lie about reality. And that’s precisely the last sort of person you’d want to… say… promote to be the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House, but hey, the Republican Party are that goddamned determined to run this nation off a cliff.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/21/2188768/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Jason-Smith-2023-Update

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