Looking at it one way, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) may have ingloriously cemented the position of women in Congress as few others have done.
During a markup hearing by the House Oversight Committee last week, Greene decided to take partisan jousting to a greasy low when she picked a fight over a fellow congresswoman’s appearance.
“I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene said to Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.), sending the entire proceeding into an hour of chaos that included a bad, bawdy badminton match of jabs from both sides.
Social media and comment sections were on fire with folks chiding the women.
“Women. I thought I was watching some high school girls arguing over each other’s makeup. Could we please get some adults in congress.”
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) clutched his pearls after the showdown, saying it’s “not a good look for Congress.”
For decades, the tiny number of women in Congress (with a big-whoop 28 percent of seats filled by women, the 118th Congress has the most ever) have been a largely dignified, hard-working, pant-suited phalanx of elected leaders who legislate, debate and represent with minimal doses of the debasement and depravity that male leaders have regularly brought to Capitol Hill.
Isn’t it time to acknowledge the saying that true equality is reached when women can be as mediocre (or combative, or flawed, or inexperienced) as men, and still succeed and lead?
Former first lady Michelle Obama said something like that, too.
“I wish that girls could fail as bad as men do and be okay,” Obama said at the United State of Women Summit in Los Angeles in 2018.
Greene’s attack last week showed how much women can emulate the men who have been failing to uphold the “dignity and respect” that Speaker Johnson said he’s longing for.
As a boys’ club, Capitol Hill has been hosting congressional fights for centuries.
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In 1798, congressmen from Connecticut and Vermont dueled with a hickory walking stick and metal tongs from the chamber’s fireplace as part of an ongoing conflict in which they had already hurled spit and insults at each other.
Congressional violence escalated as America headed toward civil war.
Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina famously beat Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into a bloody mess with a gold-headed cane over the Northerner’s speech about slavery in 1856.
“Shoving. Punching. Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen brawling in bunches while colleagues stood on chairs to get a good look. At least once, a gun was fired on the House floor,” Yale University history professor Joanne B. Freeman wrote in her book “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.”
Those divisions in our young nation often played out on Capitol Hill in blood and spittle. The end of the war didn’t end the brawls, though.
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In 1902, during a debate over the Philippine Islands, both senators from South Carolina went at each other in a fistfight that erupted, turning the Senate chamber into one big saloon brawl.
In 1985, Rep. Bob Dornan (R-Calif.) went after Rep. Thomas Downey (D-N.Y.), roughing him up and yanking his tie (then telling everyone he was just straightening it). The congressmen had been going at each other for a while before it got physical.
House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) stepped in and told Dornan, “You can settle it on the street, but don’t settle it on the House floor.”
Any hope that we’ve evolved into bipartisan decorum in the marble halls of Congress shattered in the fall, when congressional dudes made Capitol Hill sound like gym class.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) allegedly sucker-punched Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) in the back as he passed his entourage in the hallway in November.
McCarthy said “I guess our shoulders hit” after Burchett said the congressman from California elbowed him right in his kidneys, in view of at least one reporter who said she witnessed the jab.
On the Senate side, former MMA fighter Markwayne Mullin (do I really need to put the “R” here?) challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fight.
“Well, stand your butt up then,” Mullin said, standing up and starting to take his ring off.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shut down the thuggery.
Keeping it real back on the House side, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) snapped at a Democrat wearing a light blue suit, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (Fla.), during a hearing.
“You look like a Smurf,” Comer said.
With that attitude, it’s no wonder Comer utterly failed at controlling the mess that came out of Greene’s mouth last week when she attacked Crockett.
Comer said Greene’s words lacked decorum but didn’t violate rules about attacking other members.
So Crockett took her turn to strike back, dispelling any thought that women will simply back down and take it.
“I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling,” Crockett said. “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
Actually, that’s probably better than anything a hickory cane could do.
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