Hice’s rather febrile approach to politics is presumably motivated, in part, by his view that we are now living in the End Times and the worry that “we have little time” left on Earth to effect major change. As evidence that the end is near, Hice has cited the appearance of blood moons as harbingers of imminent cataclysmic “world-changing events”. That said, whereas the destructive consequences of blood moons are a source of real worries about the status of the Earth, Hice dismisses climate change as a “propaganda” tool of the “Radical Environmental Movement” to make people of believe in an “impending environmental disaster”. His attempts at reasoning do not tend to observe discernible standards.
Election fraud conspiracy mongering
Hice was one of the 139 Republican representatives who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Congress. He was also one of 126 members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v Pennsylvania, the utterly silly and quickly dismissed lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court to contest the results of the 2020 election – though remember that the motivation for the signatories was not to win because the claims in the suit were correct, but to undermine public trust in US democratic institutions. In June 2021, Hice was one of 21 House Republicans to vote against a resolution to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
And in January 2021, Hice made an unsuccessful objection to the counting of Georgia’s electoral votes on the grounds (de facto) that the count was likely to lead to a result he didn’t favor. Indeed, Hice continued to make false claims about the Georgia results being tainted by mass fraud and Trump really winning throughout his secretary of state campaigns – which is, of course, particularly notable since the secretary of state is the person who oversees Georgia’s elections and who is in charge of voter registration, certification of results, investigations into alleged election fraud, and a number of other elections-related issues. There is a (non-comprehensive) list of baldfaced lies Hice promoted about the 2020 Georgia elections during his campaign here.
In 2020, Hice supported Louie Gohmert’s bill to, just as well, ban the Democratic Party. That would take care of all those pesky election-related troubles.
Christian nationalism
A genuine MAGA cultist, Hice refers to himself as a “constitutional conservative”, and has a remarkable history of sharing quotes falsely attributed to various Founding Fathers in order to support that label (there’s a brief list here). His abject disregard for accuracy when it comes to issues related to the Constituion is worth keeping in mind when you look at e.g. his view on the separation of church and state: Hice believes that Christians have been “tricked” into a “false belief” about such a separation. As Hice sees it, not only is the church-state separation a myth but something that only leads to government corruption as the government will miss input from “uprighteous, nice people who have moral compasses” (presumably, such government corruption has ceased during the second Trump presidency); indeed, the idea of a separation of church and state is, according to Hice, the source of all social ills (including, in particular, gang violence) and all decline Hice – demonstrably falsely, in fact – believes have befallen America.
And of course, the separation of church and state is only a myth for Christians. Muslims are a different matter. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to Muslims. As Hice wrote in his 2012 book A Call to Reclaim America, “[a]lthough Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection”. He predictably neglects to mention that his description of Islam precisely encapsulates his own view of Christianity, though maybe that’s fine since he also explicitly believes that what consistutional rights you have should be determined by whether you belong to a cultural majority; he also, of course, neglects to consider the rather obvious point that, even if the description of Islam were correct, the First Amendment is usually understood as supporting political speech as well.
Muslims, by the way, don’t only have objectionable political beliefs; as Hice stated in his book It’s Now or Never, there is also an active Muslim Brotherhood plot to take over the United States. Hice quoted former U.S. general William G. Boykin as a source for that claim, which is a slightly less trustworthy source than his own paranoid imagination; indeed, quoting William Boykin as an authority on anything is in itself more than sufficient to warrant an entry here. Hice admitted that he couldn’t actually name any of the people he was afraid were taking over America, but that’s unimportant since he “usually can’t pronounce Muslim names anyway.”
Of course, it should also be remembered that Hice has long been involved in the Pulpit Freedom Sunday project to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which makes churches’ tax exempt status dependent on not endorsing political figures from the pulpit; Hice, of course, angrily and at length complains that going after churches’ tax status for violating the amendment – he describes requiring Christians to follow the law is tantamount to threatening, bullying, and intimidating Christians into silence – is precisely a violation of the separation of church and state. The separation of church and state is, in other words, real when Hice needs it to be.
Hice has also been a leading supporter of the public display of the Ten Commandments in government buildings and is the founder of Ten Commandments Georgia, Inc., a group advocating for the display of the Ten Commandments in every Georgia county courthouse. Courts that disagree are, in Hice’s view, “judicial terrorists” – how could anyone who disagrees with him, Jody Hice, not be a terrorist? It is, after all, the duty of every American – the courts included – to ensure that the government follows God’s law, not secular laws.
Now, even though he has a muddy view of the First Amendment, Hice has a very clear view of the Second Amendment. “It is my belief that any, any, any, any weapon that our government and law enforcement possesses ought to be allowed for individuals to possess in this country”, said Hice, something that is worth keeping in mind when Hice suggests a “Second Amendment response” to immigration – indeed, he suggested that combatting immigration is “the reason we have a Second Amendment” in the first place. His reasoning for his take on the matter is of course the putative need good citizens have to defend themselves against government overreach. And to deflect an obvious worry with that maxim, Hice blames mass shootings, such as those that occurred at Virginia Tech and in Aurora on abortion rights, on the separation of church and state and the teaching of evolution in public schools (indeed, Hice thinks that public schools are “totalitarian” “camps for indoctrination” reminiscent of Nazi Germany and in fact that the very existence of public schools is a Nazi-like scheme – of course, Hice wants schools to be camps for totalitarian indoctrination; the complaint is more precisely that schools currently don’t indoctrinate kids with the kind of totalitarian ideology he wants). As for the Sandy Hook school shooting, Hice declared that it was the result of “kicking God out of the public square” with the end of school-organized prayer. The latter factor was, according to Hice, also the direct cause of the Penn State child molestation affair, never mind that Sandusky went to school before organized school prayers were banned, and never mind that prayers apparently don’t work quite as well for Catholics; details – Hice has never cared much for those.
Social issues
Hice is a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage and cosponsored, in 2015, a resolution to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Criticizing advocates for same sex marriage (prior to Obergefell v Hodges), Hice denied that legal discrimination towards gays and lesbians existed at all: “If anything”, said Hice, it is the Christian community that faces government discrimination as a result of a Satanic plot to “chip away” at “our Christian rights”. He is also opposed to bans on conversion therapy, since by banning such therapy “we are enslaving and entrapping potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals in a lifestyle that frankly they are not.”
He has, moreover, compared homosexuality to alcoholism, drug addiction, “tendencies to lie” and “tendencies to be violent”, and gay relationships to incest and bestiality. And a mind like Hice’s quickly goes into paranoid conspiracy theory land on these issues: In his 2012 book, for instance, Hice asserted that the gay agenda included a covert plot from zeh gays to recruit and sodomize children. He also thinks that supporters of abortion rights are worse than Adolf Hitler.
And keep in mind that, although he is out of Congress, he remains in a position to do significant harm as president of FRC’s political action arm. There is a decent Jody Hice resource here.
Diagnosis: No, he hasn’t gone away at all. And he remains as flamboyantly delusional, paranoid and fanatic as ever. No one is safe.
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