OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Republicans are being called out by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who said their actions were an “utter embarrassment” on the same day that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was accused of pushing a Republican colleague and a Republican senator challenged a witness in a congressional hearing to a fight.
“This is a Fox News alert,” Ingraham said on The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday. “We just got our hands on a new video of what’s been going down on Capitol Hill.”
After playing a clip of the school brawl scene from the movie Mean Girls, Ingraham sneeringly said, “Well, it’s not that far off from the truth. It’s getting pretty nasty up there.”
Ingraham talked about how McCarthy was accused of bumping into Rep. Tim Burchett while Burchett was giving an interview. This happened after Burchett voted to remove McCarthy as speaker in October. McCarthy said that the claim was false.
She said that Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was in charge of getting McCarthy fired, has now filed an ethics complaint against him.
She said that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Rep. Darrell Issa “a word I’m not going to say on TV” after he and a few other Republicans voted against her plan to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security Secretary.
Some time ago, Greene wrote something about Issa on X, which used to be Twitter. She used a clip of former President Donald Trump saying, “She said he’s a p****.”
After Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz asked Republican Rep. James Comer about his family’s finances, Comer lost it and started calling Moskowitz names. This is what Ingraham meant when she said that the oversight committee hearing “devolved into kindergarten name-calling.”
“You look like a Smurf,” Comer told Moskowitz.
The insult “could be the best line ever,” Ingraham said, before adding that “if those were the undercard bouts, then the Senate held its main event.”
Before Congress, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told Sean O’Brien, the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to “stand your butt up” and end a fight right there in the room.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate panel holding the hearing, yelled at Mullin to sit down.
“I never thought I’d say this, but Bernie Sanders seems to be the voice of reason here,” Ingraham said.
“Everything you just saw was a complete and utter embarrassment. It shouldn’t be what is projected to our kids from our nation’s Capitol. Reminder to all of you, yeah, the children are watching. You’re supposed to be the adults in the room. So act like it.”
WATCH:
McCarthy could face some discipline from the GOP-controlled chamber following an alleged ‘shoving’ incident involving another Republican lawmaker on Tuesday.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) claimed that McCarthy delivered a “cheap shot” shove to his back when he was giving an interview to an NPR reporter in a Capitol Building hallway, a claim that the California Republican has since denied.
Despite that denial, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who along with Burchett and six other Republicans voted with all Democrats in late December to oust McCarthy from the Speaker’s chair, said late Tuesday he is filing an ethics complaint over the incident.
“Gaetz wrote a letter to House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Fla.) and Ranking Member Susan Wild (D-Pa.) on Tuesday arguing that the altercation, which involved McCarthy allegedly elbowing Burchett in the back, ‘deserves immediate and swift investigation by the Ethics Committee,'” Axios reported.
Burchett claimed that McCarthy “sucker punched” him “in a shot to the kidney.”
“This Congress has seen a substantial increase in breaches of decorum, unlike anything we have seen since the pre-Civil War era,” Gaetz said. “I myself have been a victim of outrageous conduct on the House floor as well, but nothing like an open and public assault on a Member, committed by another Member. The rot starts at the top.”
He added, “While Rep. Burchett is within his rights to decline to press charges against Rep. McCarthy, your Committee does have a duty to investigate breaches of the binding Code of Official Conduct.”
“You don’t expect that sort of thing from an adult, certainly not one who was once third in line for the White House,” Burchett later said to Fox News, adding he believes the push was “deliberate.”
“I’ll take a polygraph test. And have Kevin take a polygraph test,” he said. “It was deliberate. It was just a cheap shot by a bully.”
