On August 12, 2010, Gohmert appeared on Anderson Cooper 360° to defend recent comments he made on the floor of the House regarding "terror babies". Initially, Gohmert had claimed (in a speech made on the House floor in June 2010) that an ex-FBI agent had told him about "terror baby" plots. On Fox Business News, Gohmert had later claimed that an airline passenger with a relative in Hamas had a grandchild who was to be intentionally born in the United States.[14] In the interview, Gohmert asserted that pregnant women from the Middle East are traveling to the US on tourist visas, planning to deliver the child there. According to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, this automatically grants citizenship to the child. Gohmert asserted that the child would then be returned to the mother's home country and be submitted to a life of terrorist training. When repeatedly asked by the host for any evidence of this, Gohmert did not provide substantiation for either the ex-FBI agent story or the airline passenger story, but gave a description of a Washington Post article,[15] which described so-called "birth tourism" packages, mainly directed at Chinese tourists. These packages (one was described in the article for $14,750) were described by Gohmert as a "gaping hole in the security of our country". When asked several times by Cooper for the connection and any corroborating evidence, Gohmert responded "If you don't think this is evidence, you have to believe that the terrorists are more stupid than these enterprising people".[16]The Daily Show later parodied this incident.[17]
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