The Barr House Committee hearing

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
If they stop you at the entrance then how'd he have it? He was clearly past the cloakroom.

The formal rules of House and Senate decorum apply strictly to the actual floor, and the party cloakrooms are directly off the floor; Rep Lamb was stopped at the door between the cloakroom and the floor.

The point is that your claim that this rule is not normally enforced and/or would not have been enforced for a Democrat is directly disproved. The official rules of decorum, while certainly a bit of an artificial pretense, are quite strictly enforced even in the less formal House.
 

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
The formal rules of House and Senate decorum apply strictly to the actual floor, and the party cloakrooms are directly off the floor; Rep Lamb was stopped at the door between the cloakroom and the floor.

The point is that your claim that this rule is not normally enforced and/or would not have been enforced for a Democrat is directly disproved. The official rules of decorum, while certainly a bit of an artificial pretense, are quite strictly enforced even in the less formal House.
Fair enough but it's a pretty stupid rule.
 

Arlos

Sad Monarchist
In many ways, Congress is its own funny little subculture. A lot of this is traditions of formal decorum that were normal in Western high society in the Founding era, retained in Congress and pretty much nowhere else.
Too bad fist fighting isn’t part of western parliament culture anymore, in some way, it showed they cared :p
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Too bad fist fighting isn’t part of western parliament culture anymore, in some way, it showed they cared :p

While the most famous incident in Congress was of course the vicious assault on Senator Charles Sumner, history professor Dr. Joanne Freeman's The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War documents over seventy violent altercations between Congressmen in just the three decades leading up to the Civil War. Congressmen in this era routinely carried knives and pistols on the floor, often gifted by constituents specifically to encourage political violence.

Edit: In any case, the last time there was a serious fistfight in the United States Congress was 1902. There was an incident in 1985 where two Congressmen got into a physical confrontation, but it didn't escalate to actual blows.
 
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