“Sir, this is a time, this is a place,” Mullin said to O’Brien from the dais. “We can do it here.”
“OK, perfect,” O’Brien responded, adding, “I’d love to do it right now.”
“Well, stand your butt up then,” Mullins, a former mixed martial arts fighter said, rising from his chair and reaching to remove his wedding ring in apparent preparation to throw a punch.
Watch the altercation below
As the two men shouted at each other, independent Senator Bernie Sanders, the chair of the panel, intervened and repeatedly told Mullin to return to his chair.
“You’re a United States senator! Sit down, please,” he said, wagging his finger as Mullin and O’Brien continued to talk over each other from across the hearing room. “Hold it!” Sanders yelled, banging his gavel.
‘This place is a pressure cooker.’
Matt Gaetz, US representative for Florida
The morning dust-ups carried into the afternoon, as Republican James Comer and Democrat Jared Moskowitz had an expletive-laden shouting match during a hearing of the Oversight Committee called to discuss the personal finances of US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
When Moskowitz pointed to reports of Comer’s own financial dealings with family members, Comer called the Florida Democrat, who was dressed in a blue suit and blue tie, a liar, adding, “You look like a Smurf”.
Some Capitol Hill veterans chalked up the silliness to fraying patience among lawmakers who have been asked to work without a break for several weeks in a row, an unusual phenomenon in Congress, where recesses are frequent.
“Today is another example of why Congress shouldn’t be in session for five weeks straight,” Doug Andres, spokesperson for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Weird things happen.”
There are deeper reasons, too.
In the weeks since Speaker Mike Johnson was elected to succeed McCarthy, a proclaimed moment of unity, the same Republican fissures that led to McCarthy’s ouster have erupted back into public view. The temporary spending bill Johnson is pushing, and that the House is set to consider, has none of the spending cuts or policy changes that hard-right Republicans had wanted.
By day’s end Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who forced the vote to depose McCarthy, had come out against the spending plan – and filed an ethics complaint against the former speaker for the alleged assault on Burchett.
Flaring tempers were clearly on the new speaker’s mind during a news conference when he told reporters, “This place is a pressure cooker.”
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He said he hoped quick passage of the spending measure followed by a week away from Washington would do his party good.
“This will allow everybody to go home for a couple of days for Thanksgiving,” he said. “Everybody can cool off.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.