So much for civility.

In a standing-room-only committee hearing Wednesday, state House Republicans voted to remove one Democrat from every House committee. They also made it easier to ignore amendments to bills.

House Democrats responded by cat-calling, booing and screaming at House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny.

The ironic part of it all? Lawmakers were bickering over government reform.

Wednesday’s partisan spectacle was unusual even in Pennsylvania politics.

It came just one day after President Barack Obama began his State of the Union address with a call for civility and Democratic and Republican lawmakers sat next to each other, breaking a long tradition of separating themselves by party.

Just last week, Gov. Tom Corbett’s inaugural address challenged state lawmakers to be “firmly dedicated to a civil discourse.”

At Wednesday’s hearing of the House Rules Committee, lawmakers screamed epithets about dictatorship and slavery, saying, “Welcome to the gulag.”

One called Turzai “Monarch Mike” for bringing the rules on a vote without allowing some Democratic members to speak.

In the end, Democrats stormed out of the room while a roll-call vote on the changes took place.

The committee approved the measure, which now goes to the full House, where Republicans hold a 112-91 majority. The GOP regained the House majority for the first time in four years in the November election.

A flare-up this week in the State Government Committee partially sparked Wednesday’s showdown.

On Monday, Chairman Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, refused to allow the committee to consider Democratic Rep. Babette Joseph’s amendment to a bill that calls for creating an online searchable database of state expenditures.

Metcalfe said the amendment was filed after the committee’s deadline for accepting amendments to bills. Josephs insisted she filed her amendment before the deadline.

Rep. Greg Vitale, D-Delaware, suggested Metcalfe postpone action on the bill until the next meeting to allow the amendment to be considered “in the spirit of collegiality.”

Metcalfe ignored the suggestion and told committee members they could offer amendments to the bill when it reached the House floor.

Republicans now claim that Democrats are trying to stymie the reform measures by submitting more than 40 amendments to the bills.

“We’re not doing these floor games,” Turzai said Wednesday morning.

So Turzai proposed a change in House rules that would allow Republicans to streamline debate on the House floor by tabling a proposed amendment without tabling the entire piece of legislation. He also cut Democratic members of committees from 10 to 9, compared with Republicans’ 15 members.

House Minority Leader Frank Dermody, D-Allegheny, called the move “an unprecedented attack” and an “attempt to muzzle the minority.”

And Democrats pointed out that Republican members filed more than 2,700 amendments to bills last year.

While Wednesday’s events might not signal a session wrought with partisan fighting yet, it doesn’t look good to voters, said G. Terry Madonna, a pollster and political analyst at Franklin & Marshall College.

“The average citizen won’t discern who’s right and who’s wrong; they will just look at the Legislature and see it as becoming dysfunctional,” he said.

Madonna said he’s not surprised there was a “brushfire” at the beginning of a session in which lawmakers are more polarized than almost ever before.

“This is going to make people who care about reform believe [lawmakers] are not serious about reform,” he said.