U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wants Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to apologize to Sen. Ted Cruz for calling the Texas Republican a “schoolyard bully.”
Lee says Senate decorum doesn’t allow such angry language.
Oh really?
He’s probably right about the need to follow decorum. But someone ought to remind the junior senator from Utah that much worse things have been said to senators by their colleagues.
My favorite outburst came from then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who was serving as the presiding officer of the Senate – the VP’s role under the U.S. Constitution. Cheney was involved in a heated argument on the Senate floor with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. I can’t recall the topic at the moment, but Cheney ended up telling Leahy – within earshot of several other senators – to, shall we say, do something quite unnatural to himself.
I’ll merely invoke my late father’s favorite description of the term Cheney used on his colleague: Dad would call it the “functional four-letter word.”
Sen. Lee needs to chill out. “Schoolyard bully” is far from the worst transgression ever committed on the floor of the Senate.