Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California said yesterday that Republicans wanted to send soldiers “to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”
Mr. Stark’s disparaging remarks peppered the debate preceding a failed vote to override President Bush’s veto of a $35 billion increase for an insurance program for children.
He said Mr. Bush told “lies” about the war and the health care bill.
“The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up in Iraq, in the United States and in Congress,” he told the chamber.
Democratic leaders didn’t disavow the vitriol from Mr. Stark, chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee on health.
Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, California Democrat, who was presiding over the chamber during the debate, reminded members “not to refer to the president in any personal way.”
Rep. Kevin Brady, Texas Republican, whose brother served as an Army medic in Iraq, stood on the House floor to call Mr. Stark’s remarks “despicable.”
“It is beneath contempt to have a member of Congress stand here and accuse the president of, in effect … assassinating our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
“It is beneath contempt as well that we will sit here silently and allow such a remark to be tolerated, accepted, if not embraced.”
Democratic leaders opted not to censure or reprimand Mr. Stark, a longtime antiwar activist known for such episodes, including a 2003 incident in which he repeatedly yelled “you little fruitcake” at a Republican committee chairman.
He once said former Health and Human Services Director Louis Sullivan, who is black, was a “disgrace to his race” and called a female member of Congress a “whore for the insurance industry.”
His hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, in a 2003 editorial described him as a “backbencher who can’t control his tongue” and called for his ouster for lacking “class and dignity.”
During a brief suspension of House business yesterday to consider Republican charges that Mr. Stark violated the chamber’s rules of decorum, he was asked to voluntarily withdrawal his words from the record but he refused, said a congressional aide present at the time.
Democrats asserted that accusing Republicans of sanctioning the decapitation of U.S. troops “for the president’s amusement” was appropriate to the debate on the child health bill, the aide said.
House rules permit broad latitude for the sake of free debate but prohibit personal attacks on another member’s character.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, criticized Republicans when asked about Mr. Stark’s rhetoric.
“Mr. Hoyer regrets Republicans chose their president over 10 million children’s health care,” Hoyer spokeswoman Stacey Farnen Bernards said.
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