House Majority Leader Steve Scalise was delivering floor remarks yesterday about his party’s debt ceiling crisis, boasting about the GOP’s far-right ransom note, when an unidentified House Democrat interrupted him with some heckling.
Outbursts like these are not uncommon, especially in the midst of heated debates, so the Louisiana Republican did what members always do under these circumstances: He paused in response to the interruption.
At that point, under normal conditions, the person presiding over the chamber is supposed to bang the gavel, call for order, and wait for the chamber to settle. Yesterday, however, that’s not quite what happened. The Hill reported:
Democrats erupted in laughter on the House floor Wednesday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who was presiding over the chamber — called for decorum.
To fully appreciate the degree to which House Democrats “erupted in laughter,” it’s worth taking a minute to watch the brief video of the proceedings.
Wow Democrats just laughed at Marjorie Taylor Greene when she asked them to abide by decorum of the House pic.twitter.com/2jrLFyAEWg
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 24, 2023
If you watch closely, you’ll notice that a clerk quietly told the right-wing congresswoman what she was supposed to say: “The members are reminded to abide by the decorum of the House.” That, of course, is what members presiding over the chamber always say, and Greene echoed the standard line she’d been given.
The problem, however, is that the presiding member — the one stressing the importance of “decorum” in the chamber — isn’t usually an unhinged extremist who has never shown any interest in “the decorum of the House.”
A HuffPost report highlighted the reactions from a variety of observers, “many of whom provided examples of why the conspiracy-theory-embracing Greene falls short in decorum, from her heckling of President Joe Biden at the State of the Union to liking social media posts that called for the assassination of Democrats.”
Eventually, order in the chamber was restored — but not before the radical Georgian offered a fresh reminder that she’s an ongoing embarrassment to her party, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s devotion to her notwithstanding.
