A Nevada Democratic Assemblyman whose erratic behavior dominated headlines for weeks will go down in history as the first lawmaker ever expelled from the state Legislature by his peers.

The Nevada Assembly voted Thursday to oust Assemblyman Steven Brooks in somber, emotional hearing in which several members were heard crying and Assembly Majority Leader William Horne said people didn't feel safe with him in the legislative building.

"How dare they?" Brooks told The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview immediately after the voice vote. "I've been convicted of nothing."

Brooks alleged that unspecified opponents have tried to kill him. He didn't take questions.

"Yes, tried to kill me," he said. "I'm an open book. They won't let me testify at the Grant Sawyer Building, and they sent 100 police officers to arrest me."

"Let me ask you, how can they do that?" Brooks added before hanging up.

Brooks lawyer, Mitchell Posin, said he was "disappointed" and surprised, "especially because I was recently told it wasn't going to be heard today."

Posin said he would discuss with Brooks their next step.

The lawyer added that he didn't know what Brooks' "100 police officers" comment meant.

The Nevada Democrat has been arrested twice since January and is accused of making threats toward his colleagues, including Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick.

Brooks also was denied the purchase of a gun in Sparks last month after he was banished from the chambers. His lawyer, Mitchell Posin, says there's been a misunderstanding and Brooks doesn't pose any real threat to anyone.

Brooks, 41, won re-election in November by a 2-to-1 margin over an unknown challenger. He first was arrested Jan. 19 in a car with a gun and dozens of rounds of ammunition after allegedly voicing a threat against Kirkpatrick, a fellow North Las Vegas Democrat. The state attorney general's office is handling that case, and no formal charges have yet been filed.

Horne said Brooks' unpredictable behavior, which included missing meetings, calling press conferences he never showed up for, and posing shirtless for a Las Vegas newspaper, had made the session look "more like a circus and daytime drama than a serious legislative body."

It's the first time the Legislature initiated the expulsion of a member since a lawmaker was accused of libeling other members in 1867, although that case never came to a formal vote. Back then, Assemblyman A.H. Lissak of Storey County had published a letter referring to the Assembly speaker's "sore-eyed, red-haired, baboon-looking face" in a political feud that prompted a ban on Territorial Enterprise reporters from the chambers.

Thursday's vote came after a bipartisan select committee met earlier this week to review a 900-page independent investigation into Brooks' conduct. That committee voted 6-1 to recommend expulsion, with the lone dissenting vote coming from Assemblywoman Dina Neal.

Neal choked up when she told the Assembly floor that she believed in degrees of discipline, and favored suspending Brooks rather than taking the extreme step of expulsion, which she called "nothing short of political death."

"I believe in the human form in all its frailties and all of its faults," Neal said in the 32-minute hearing. "I also believe in the power of human recovery."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/28/nevada-assembly-ousts-embattled-lawmaker-in-first-ever-expulsion/?test=latestnews#ixzz2Ou2rHFAL

This guy lost his damn mind. The capitol building is right up the street from my house and when this first went down they had Capitol Police and local Sheriff's and State Troopers with rifles surrounding the building cutting off traffic cause he threatened to kill the Speaker of the Assembly and tried to buy a gun at Sheels.

doesn't sound like a cool,collected,rational Lawmaker to me,but then few are!
But this Guy sure sounds like a Loon,provided the reports are correct!

and there are nutcases like this who keep getting re-elected...



http://search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0oGdbdCs1VR9lsApoBXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB2dnNyYmR1BHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA3NrMQR2dGlkA1NNRTE4OV8yMzQ-/SIG=12oeialdq/EXP=1364599746/**http%3a//video.search.yahoo.com/search/video%3fp=Rep.%2bHank%2bJohnson

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) is afraid that the U.S. Territory of Guam is going to "tip over and capsize" due to overpopulation.

Johnson expressed his worries during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense budget Thursday.

Addressing Adm. Robert Willard, who commands the Navy's Pacific Fleet, Johnson made a tippy motion with his hands and said sternly, "My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize."

Willard paused and said: "We don't anticipate that."

Like other islands, Guam is attached to the sea floor, which makes it extremely unlikely that it will tip over, even if there are lots and lots of people on it. Guam is 30 miles long and up to 9 miles wide in certain spots, with a population of 175,000 civilians. The military is proposing the addition of 8,000 U.S. servicemembers and their families.

Reached for comment, a spokesman for Johnson said the lawmaker had visited Guam, and his concern was that the influx of military personnel would overwhelm the island's infrastructure and ecosystem.

seems like he's not done yet...
http://news.yahoo.com/ex-nev-assemblyman-arrested-hours-expulsion-143335074.html

Considering that the guy might have mental issues, like a breakdown of some sort, and considering that he has yet to be convicted of anything in a court of law, and considering that he may have indeed posed a hazard to his fellows, I'd have to say that the right thing to do would be to SUSPEND him until such time as his legal/criminal/mental health issues are resolved one way or the other. If things are found to be against him, THEN would be the time to expel him. To do so now seems to me to be somewhat premature, and if his problem is a temporary mental one he might recover from, the expulsion wrecks his life and would stand in the way of any such recovery.

yea, well... you can't really threaten to shoot co workers and not not get fired...

Unless we are directly involved, all we "know" is what we hear. Determination of the facts is the court's job and I would never "convict" anyone on hearsay. Hell...I don't even like rumours and gossip (unless it's really "juicy")

send him to Guam.

your right, but here in texas, if someone calls the police and says a person made a threat with a gun, and they are found with a gun, they are in trouble, whether he said it or not...

Ummmmmmm, this isn't just one isolated incident. He was arrested three times for some very serious crimes in less then a month by three different agencies. The guy also threatened to kill the Assembly Speaker and was found that very night with weapons and ammunition in his car. Then he tried to buy more guns and ammo at a sporting good store less then 30 minutes from the state capitol where the Assembly Speaker just happened to be that night.

This bafoon had the whole capitol complex (Governor's Office, State Senate, Assembly, Supreme Court and Attorney Generals office blocked off with heavily armed law enforcement officers carrying military grade rifles restricting access to buildings and roads around the capitol for close to a month and a half. I have never seen anything like it in my life except for when maybe the President comes to town or the IHOP shooting here locally that they thought was at first a terrorist attack against members of the military.

LAS VEGAS - Police chased a former lawmaker on a freeway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles and arrested him at gunpoint following a struggle, hours after he became the first person ever expelled from the Nevada Legislature.

Steven Brooks was jailed in California's San Bernardino County after being subdued with punches and a Taser. Police alleged he attacked a police dog with a wrench.

"It's hard to know where he was going, what he thought he was doing and why he would be involved in a high-speed chase," Brooks' attorney, Mitchell Posin, told The Associated Press on Friday. "I think he feels the world is against him. But I'm just piecing together bits of information."

Brooks' arrest Thursday near the California city of Victorville was his third since January, and came just hours after colleagues in the Legislature deemed the Democrat from North Las Vegas too dangerous and unpredictable to serve his elected term. Lawmakers wept Thursday as they cited concerns about their own safety and evidence collected about an increasingly bizarre series of public incidents.

Police allege that Brooks threatened a Democratic party Assembly leader before one arrest and threw punches and grabbed for the gun of a police officer in his second arrest about three weeks later. He also was hospitalized for five days for a mental evaluation following another police encounter that didn't result in an arrest.

He was sworn in and then banished from the Legislature building as a possible security risk days after arriving in a hooded sweatshirt and ducking into an office to avoid reporters.

He posed shirtless for a newspaper photograph to show injuries that he said he suffered during his first arrest, but that weren't apparent. He tried unsuccessfully to buy a rifle at a sporting goods store in Sparks. He bought body armor from a radio show host in Las Vegas. He lost his job as a Las Vegas city management analyst. And he reported his car stolen.

Assembly Majority Leader William Horne, D-Las Vegas, who called Brooks "potentially dangerous" and issued an order banning him from the Legislature building in Carson City, said Friday he was saddened by Brooks' arrest.

"I hope they get Steven the help he clearly needs before he or someone else is hurt or worse," Horne said.

During Thursday's arrest Brooks appeared to be punched by one uniformed officer before he was shackled by the wrists and ankles and taken away on an ambulance gurney. Police said the chase followed a call from a tow truck operator who argued with a motorist about the cost of fixing a flat tire on the freeway shoulder in Barstow.

"We just know the tow truck driver was uncomfortable enough to call us for assistance," California Highway Patrol Officer Don Spiker said. "He said the subject was acting strange."

The tow operator didn't immediately respond Friday to messages from The Associated Press.

Barstow police allege Brooks, 41, sped away with the tire still flat and tossed objects from the vehicle before a spike strip was deployed to disable the SUV and he tangled with uniformed officers and the police dog at the side of the freeway. The objects were not described, and police didn't respond to questions about whether Brooks was armed.

Witness Jennifer Simpson said she was alerted to the chase by police helicopters overhead and saw a man get out of a red four-door SUV after it veered to the side of the road near Victorville, about 180 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Simpson, a mother of two who lives in an apartment near the interstate, said the man didn't follow officers' commands to turn around and put his hands in the air. He instead ran back to the SUV, chased by a police dog.

Simpson said the driver shut himself in the vehicle before several officers with guns drawn pulled him out. She said she saw at least one officer punch the man several times.

Simpson's husband videotaped four minutes of the struggle, in which uniformed officers wrestle the driver to the ground in front of the SUV and an officer in a tan uniform raises his arms three times in apparent punching motions. The driver cannot be seen on the ground.

Kris Reilly, city editor of The Daily Press in Victorville, said he arrived to see the motorist a few minutes later, struggling against wrist and ankle restraints as he was loaded on a gurney into an ambulance.

"He was yelling something to the effect that, 'These cops are going down!'" Reilly said. "He was yelling quite a bit."

Barstow Police Chief Albert Ramirez released a statement alleging that when the police dog was sent into the SUV, Brooks choked and hit the dog with a socket wrench. The dog, named Buck, was treated by a veterinarian head and leg cuts.

"Brooks continued to resist the officers and not comply with their orders," the Barstow police statement said. "A Taser was utilized on Brooks and after this, handcuffs were applied."

The police report does not describe any police officers being injured and doesn't address whether officers punched Brooks.

Telephone and email messages for Ramirez and other Barstow police supervisors weren't returned.

Brooks was examined at Barstow Community Hospital before he was taken to a San Bernardino County jail in Rancho Cucamonga, police said.

Jail records showed Brooks was being held on $100,000 bail on four felony charges including resisting a police officer with force, willful harm to a police service dog, felony evading arrest and throwing objects from a vehicle with intent to harm.

San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said Brooks was due for arraignment Tuesday in Barstow.

Brooks' expulsion from the state Assembly came by voice vote following a recommendation from a bipartisan panel that met largely behind closed doors. The seven panel members voted 6-1 for expulsion after considering a more than 900-page investigative report produced by a Las Vegas lawyer hired as a special counsel.

A coalition of Nevada media outlets is seeking to have the investigative report made public.

Brooks' first arrest was Jan. 19, after he was accused of making threats toward legislative colleagues including Assembly Democratic Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick. North Las Vegas police said Brooks had a gun and ammunition in his car when he was arrested. The state attorney general's office hasn't filed criminal charges in the case.

Brooks was sworn in at the Legislature on Feb. 4, but was arrested again Feb. 10 at his estranged wife's home in Las Vegas after police alleged he tried to punch and grabbed for the gun of an officer who responded to a domestic dispute. Brooks faces a court hearing in May in Las Vegas on one felony and three lesser charges.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/steven-brooks-former-nevada-assemblyman-who-was-expelled-from-legislature-led-cops-on-chase-stunned-by-taser-then-arrested-1.4939855

Wow, they just released the details of his most recent arrest. What a psycho.

Maybe the little "Tune Up" the cops gave him and the Taser shot knocked the sense back into him.