Andy Biggs
On this date in both 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled the sitting U.S. House Representative from Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, Andy Biggs, who was first elected to Congress back in 2016, after a 14 year career in the Arizona state legislature. He did so by winning a Republican primary against Christine Jones by all of 27 votes. Outside of office, Biggs is a reminder that good things always seem to happen to the worst people, as in 1993, he was the winner of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, to the tune of $10 million.
That financial windfall gave Biggs the nest egg to jump into politics a decade later, where he could pursue true Republican hobbies, like working alongside anti-gay hate groups like United Families International, trying to ban abortion without exceptions for rape or incest, and denying the existence of climate change by claiming scientists have “manipulated data” to make the case that it exists. On that last one, Biggs actually compares his anti-intellectual plight to that of Albert Einstein, which has led to him publicly being booed, and was one of the key forces in Washington, D.C., who encouraged Donald Trump to back out of the Paris Climate accords.
Upon his return to office in 2019, Rep. Biggs also was enraged that after the longest government shutdown in history, that federal employees who had been furloughed would, y’know, be paid for all the days that they worked, and not have been doing so for free. No, really, he voted against back pay. He was also one of a dozen lawmakers to vote against compensation for 9-11 First Responders, and one of three Republican Congressman partisan enough to have called for the resignation of Robert Mueller for daring to investigate the 2016 Trump campaign for their blatant collusion with a foreign power to win the election.
This man is enough of a partisan ***hole that he even was one of two members of Congress who voted against the Covid-19 funding bill, because, and we’re not making this up… he objected that the bill regarded “couples” in households should include same sex ones. That’s right, he would rather let a plague spread across the nation than acknowledge that gay people could be in relationships.
Feel free to peruse his whole voting record, if you aren’t getting the idea:
- February 16th, 2017: Biggs 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. Because… well, the logic really isn’t there as to why, it’s just awful.
- March 16th, 2017: Andy Biggs 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: Biggs 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 Biggs 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: Andy Biggs 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: Biggs votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks.
- December 19th, 2017: Andy Biggs 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. Biggs 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 22nd, 2019: Biggs votes against HR 676, which would prevent Donald Trump from doing the unthinkable and walking away from our allies in NATO to appease the Russians.
- January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Biggs voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
- January 27th, 2019: Andy Biggs votes against HJR 30, which was meant to express disapproval of Donald Trump not acting against Russian Federation for attacking our democracy.
- February 28th, 2019: Biggs votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
- March 7th, 2019: Biggs votes against HR 183, a resolution to condemn anti-Semitism as a hateful extension of intolerance.
- March 14th, 2019: Rep. Biggs 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.
- July 12th, 2019: Biggs is one of 12 Republicans who vote against the re-authorization of the Zadroga Act to provide healthcare to 9/11 First Responders.
- July 16th, 2019: Andy Biggs 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”.
- October 17th, 2019: Biggs is one of 60 Republicans who vote against HJ Res 77, which opposed Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to abandon Syrian Kurdish forces in Northeast Syria to the mercies of a Turkish invasion.
- October 23rd, 2019: Biggs is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
- December 18th, 2019: Rep. Biggs ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
- May 15th, 2020: Biggs votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.