Some history on the subject of Congressional swearing from Bloomberg News...
Cheney's Profanity Continues Long Political Tradition (Update1)
July 1 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Vice President ****** Cheney's use of the F-word on the Senate floor last week is no anomaly in the halls of government.
Swearing, insults and fisticuffs have disrupted proceedings from England to Taiwan to the U.S. for centuries. The Earl of Sandwich preceded Cheney by more than 200 years when he uttered the F-word in Britain's House of Lords in 1783. Cheney used the profanity against Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont during a photo session on June 22.
As far back as 1798, U.S. Congressional decorum was breached by the likes of Representative Matthew Lyon, who spat tobacco juice into a critic's face. In 1925, Senator Richard Ernst described a colleague as a ``willful, malicious, wicked liar.'' Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, continued the tradition in April, when he said Iraqi war supporters who send others to do their fighting were ``chicken hawks.''
``These periods of excessive partisanship and nastiness run in cycles,'' said Ross Baker, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and author of ``Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate'' in 1980. What was unusual this time is that ``the vice president was involved and it was reported,'' Baker said.
Cheney made his remark when the Senate wasn't in session, as senators gathered for their official photo. According to CNN, Cheney told Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, he was unhappy with the committee's investigation of the government's dealings with Halliburton Co., the Houston oil-services company once headed by the vice president.
In Private
Leahy responded that he didn't like the way some Republicans had criticized him for opposing Bush judicial nominees. ``Go f--- yourself,'' Cheney replied, CNN reported.
Two hours earlier, the senators had approved a measure stiffening fines against broadcasters airing indecent content.
Most of the time, politicians don't do their cursing in public. ``Everybody I've worked for has cussed all over the place,'' said Letitia Baldrige, an etiquette expert and a former social secretary in President John Kennedy's administration. ``But you do it in private -- you do not do it on the Senate floor.''
Not until the Supreme Court released the Watergate tapes was Richard Nixon's liberal use of expletives known. Robert Caro's biographies of President Lyndon Johnson revealed his fondness not only for profanity but for ordering underlings to talk with him as he sat on the toilet.
Civility is usually the rule in deliberative bodies. The Speaker of the UK's House of Commons routinely intervenes in debates to keep decorum, although actual swearing is rare. Erskin May's guide to parliamentary practice lists 45 words, including ``blackguard,'' ``cheeky young pup'' and ``swine,'' that are forbidden.
`Spitting Lyon'
To cool passions in the U.S. Senate, members are instructed to direct their speeches to the presiding officer and never refer to colleagues by name.
As president of the Senate, Cheney is supposed to enforce the chamber's code of conduct, Senate historian Richard Baker said. ``They've got to have that kind of control or it would turn into quite a chaotic place,'' he said.
Chaos has erupted at times. When South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun was impeached by opposition parties in March, his allies cried and protested as security guards dragged them out of the National Assembly room.
Taiwanese independent politician Lo Fu-chu in March was videotaped striking and pulling the hair of People First Party legislator Diane Lee.
Most U.S. examples of legislative assault aren't so recent. There was Vermont Representative Lyon, a Jeffersonian Republican subsequently known as ``Spitting Lyon,'' who launched a mouthful of tobacco juice into the face of Representative Roger Griswold, a Connecticut Federalist. The two then set upon each other, Griswold wielding a cane and Lyon fire tongs.
`Big Time'
In May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks, a South Carolina Democrat, repeatedly struck Senator Charles Sumner with a cane after the Massachusetts Republican insulted Brooks's relative -- also a senator -- in a floor speech on whether Kansas should enter the union as a free state. Summer suffered from headaches for years afterwards.
Most of the fighting among politicians is done with words. In May, a congressman and the presiding officer of the Philippine Congress kept telling each other to shut up, escalating their bickering until it delayed the official count of the presidential election.
The campaign trail occasionally catches candidates lapsing into the kind of talk usually missing from their stump speech. U.S. President George W. Bush, unaware of an open mike, called a New York Times reporter a ``major-league a--hole'' during a 2000 campaign stop. To which Cheney replied: ``Big time.''
Point Made
Joschka Fischer, now Germany's foreign minister, used the British variant of the Bush epithet early in his career when he told a political opponent, ``With respect, Mr. President, you are an arsehole.''
Some are more subtle. In 1925, Senator Richard Ernst, a Kentucky Republican, asked his colleagues if he could call Republican Senator James Couzens of Michigan a ``willful, malicious, wicked liar'' without offending them. When they said no, he sat down, having made his point.
Some senators gave up any pretense of civility. Virginia Senator John Randolph in the 1820s was a ``walking challenge to a duel'' and would bring his hunting dogs to the Senate floor, said Baker, the Senate historian.
While the dogs have been cleared from the Capitol, the rancor hasn't. Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, last week called Representative Randy Cunningham ``an idiot'' when he said the California Republican wanted to probe the 1969 car accident near Chappaquiddick Island involving his father, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. Kennedy's passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.
Unlike most politicians in this story, Patrick Kennedy later apologized.
Cheney has given no indication he may do likewise. ``I expressed myself forcefully, felt better after I did it,'' he told Fox News on Friday.
