Incivility Infiltrates the House, Senate

In 1856, a House member from South Carolina took his cane to an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, bloodying the Senate floor and leaving the man near death. Capitol attacks these days are not as dramatic, but lawmakers from both parties lament what has become another low point in political civility.

In the latest episode, Vice President Dick Cheney used an obscenity beginning with “F” in an exchange with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) on the Senate floor where members had gathered for a group photo.

“I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor,” Leahy said of the incident a few days ago.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been. Just days earlier, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) had referred to a proposal by Leahy to subpoena Justice Department memos on prisoner interrogation as a “dumb-ass” idea.

Cheney, interviewed by Fox News on Friday, said he had no regrets about his remarks to Leahy and “I felt better after I said it.” He added, “A lot of my colleagues felt what I said badly needed to be said.”

The occasional obscenities in a body where “my good friend” is the usual form of address lay bare what has become a poisonous atmosphere in Congress this year. Tempers have been shortened by the war in Iraq and an election campaign in which Democrats, hoping to capture the White House and Congress, are on the offensive.

“It’s as bad as I’ve seen it in my 10 years in Congress,” said Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois, a moderate Republican who has led efforts to make the House a more civil place. He helped organize a bipartisan retreat at the start of every session so lawmakers can get to know each other better, but he has concluded that “the will of the membership is not there to do it next year.”

LaHood said things started going downhill a year ago, when a slew of Democratic presidential candidates began criticizing President Bush.

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland dated the lack of comity back to 1978, when Republican Newt Gingrich came to Congress with his confrontational agenda. He said things have gotten worse recently because of unfair treatment by the Republican majority.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) this past week sent Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) a proposal to protect minority rights, whoever is in power. “Too often, incivility and the heavy hand of the majority have substituted for thoughtful debate,” she wrote.

Her Senate counterpart, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, issued a similar proposal on building common ground and ending the cycle of partisan retaliation in the Senate.

Hastert’s spokesman, John Feehery, said Republicans bend over backward to be fair to Democrats, but “they argue procedure because they can’t win on substance.”

Pelosi and Hastert rarely confer on policy matters, which is not new to the House. Gingrich, when he was speaker, went for months without speaking to Democratic leader Dick Gephardt.

In the more decorous Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Daschle consult daily. But Frist also recently broke tradition and put cordiality to the test by traveling to South Dakota to campaign for Daschle’s rival in the fall elections.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said civility generally tends to break down when the minority feels it is being oppressed by the majority, or in an election season when the House and Senate floors are used for campaigning.

She said this year’s increase in tension hasn’t matched that of 1995, after the Gingrich-led Republicans took over the House, or of 1998, when impeachment proceedings against President Clinton began.

Also in the past several weeks:

* Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas), who was defeated in the Texas primary, the victim of redistricting engineered by Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), filed a complaint against DeLay with the House Ethics Committee, ending an unofficial truce of one member filing charges against another.

* Reps. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.) and Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego) squared off at a committee meeting after Kennedy overheard Cunningham make a remark about Chappaquiddick, the Massachusetts island where Kennedy’s father, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), drove off a bridge in 1969. A female aide who was in the car drowned. Cunningham and Patrick Kennedy later apologized to each other.

* Showing that aggressive language isn’t always across party lines, DeLay this past week went after Senate Republicans who differ with the House on spending levels on a highway bill, saying they were using the bill as a “slush fund to rob other programs.”

* House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), who last year called Capitol Police over a dispute with committee Democrats, said on the floor this past week that Rep. Pete Stark’s 8-year-old son “has a job being a shield for his father.” The comment came after Stark (D-Hayward) said GOP tax breaks were an obscenity that his son would have to pay for in the future.

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A History of Incivility

Some notable uncivil incidents among elected officials:

1793: A congressman challenged a former House colleague to a duel outside the Capitol and killed him.

* 1798: A day after Vermont Rep. Matthew Lyon spat in Connecticut Rep. Roger Griswold’s face, the latter approached Lyon at his desk and began beating him with a walking stick. Lyon retrieved tongs from the fireplace behind the speaker’s chair and the two fought on the House floor until fellow lawmakers ended it.

* 1832: Former Tennessee Rep. Sam Houston attacked Ohio Rep. William Stanbery with his cane on the streets of Washington. Stanbery tried to shoot Houston, but his pistol misfired.

* 1838: Rep. William J. Graves of Kentucky killed freshman Rep. Jonathan Cilley of Maine in a duel in Maryland, prompting Congress to ban duels in Washington.

* 1838: Behind the speaker’s chair, Rep. William B. Campbell held fellow Tennessee Rep. Abram P. Maury by the hair and struck him repeatedly in the face.

* 1840: Rep. Jesse Bynum of North Carolina attacked Rep. Rice Garland of Louisiana with a cane.

* 1840: North Carolina Reps. Kenneth Rayner and William Montgomery broke canes over each other’s heads.

* 1856: A speech by abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner criticizing South Carolina Sen. Andrew P. Butler drew an angry response from Butler’s relative in the House, Rep. Preston Brooks, who days later entered the Senate chamber and bludgeoned Sumner with a cane. Brooks eventually resigned, while Sumner needed three years to recover.

* 1890: Former Kentucky Rep. William P. Taulbee was fatally shot by a reporter on a stairway on the House side of the Capitol.

* 1902: Two senators were censured for engaging in a fistfight on the Senate floor.

* 1985: Thomas Downey (D-N.Y.) accused Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Calif.) of yanking his tie and threatening “bodily harm.” Dornan said he only “straightened” the tie, although he conceded that he had called Downey a “wimp.”

* 1985: As House members argued over vote counts in a late-night session, Majority Leader James Wright, a Texas Democrat, threatened to punch two Republicans in the mouth.

* 1995: After a testy exchange in a Friday night debate, Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) grappled with each other outside the House chamber before police and other lawmakers separated them.

* 1995: In what was dubbed “the brawl in the hall,” Rep. Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.) compared Republicans to the Nazis he fought in World War II, then engaged in a hallway shouting match with Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), who said Gibbons pulled his tie.

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Sources: Congressional Research Service; the Annenberg Public Policy Center; Associated Press.

Los Angeles Times