As a member of Congress, Gaetz became known for attention-seeking stunts on the House floor.
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Gaetz was elected to represent Florida’s 1st district in the House of Representatives in 2016.
A month after becoming a member of Congress in 2017, Gaetz introduced a bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2018, he invited Charles C. Johnson, an alt-right figure who has denied the Holocaust, to the State of the Union. Gaetz told The Daily Beast that he gave Johnson a ticket after he “showed up at my office” on the day of the speech but that the two did not know each other.
In 2019, he barged into a deposition of a former National Security Council official connected to Trump’s impeachment inquiry. A meeting transcript showed that Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff swiftly kicked him out of the room, telling the lawmaker, “Mr. Gaetz, take your statement to the press. They do you no good here. So please, absent yourself.”
During a 2020 vote to approve $8.3 billion in emergency funding for coronavirus aid, Gaetz wore a gas mask on the House floor.
In 2021, he went on an “America First” tour with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in which the two lawmakers repeated Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
Gaetz is also known for insulting his Democratic and Republican colleagues alike, calling Sen. Mitch McConnell “McFailure,” deriding Utah Senator-elect John Curtis as “Mitt Romney without good hair,” and calling abortion rights activists “ugly” and “overweight.”
