Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said 'the jeering, the people out there carrying nasty signs and spitting on people' reminded him of the 1960s, when he was subject to abuse as a black civil rights protester in the South. Clyburn decries lack of decorum

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said Monday that the breakdown in House decorum over the weekend — accompanied by protesters outside the Capitol hurling insults and spitting on a black lawmaker — is a “festering sore” that runs back to last September, when a Republican yelled “You lie” at President Barack Obama.

Clyburn said “the jeering, the people out there carrying nasty signs and spitting on people” reminded him of the 1960s, when he was subject to abuse as a black civil rights protester in the South. And Clyburn said the fact that a Texas Republican yelled “baby killer” inside the House chamber itself as a Democrat spoke Sunday night and Republicans “egged on” protesters in the House gallery earlier in the day is “what endangers this society.”


“I see a larger breakdown,” said Clyburn, who pressed unsuccessfully last September for his South Carolina colleague, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, to go to the well of the House and apologize to the full chamber for insulting Obama.

“I said that’s what this would lead to, and we saw it” Sunday, Clyburn said. “If something is not done, it is going to grow, fester like a sore and then run,” he said. “That’s what’s going to happen.

“It’s a festering sore that’s taking place out here and ... disrupting the decorum of the House of Representatives. That, to me, is what endangers this society.”

The line “fester like a sore and then run” comes from a Langston Hughes poem that’s also invoked in the Lorraine Hansberry play “Raisin in the Sun,” about a black family on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. Clyburn himself is a product of the civil rights movement in his native South Carolina, and his comments reflect an underlying racial current in the bitter health care debate.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) was spat on by a protester while walking to the Capitol on Saturday. Another protester yelled a racial epithet at Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). Clyburn himself has been subject to racist mail, including an anonymous fax sent to his South Carolina office in the past week, addressed to “James the Slimy N—— Clyburn” and with a drawing of a hangman’s noose and crude gallows.

“That is about as derogatory a statement as you can make in our society, and you’re going to tell me that’s about health care?” Clyburn said of the spitting incident involving Cleaver. “Nobody can tell me that’s about health care.”

It clearly still rankles Clyburn that Wilson apologized to the president through White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and not directly.

“This indirect stuff — I understand what that is. I’ve seen it all my life,” Clyburn said. “How the hell do you apologize to the president [by] talking to Rahm Emanuel? He does not have enough respect for Barack Obama to apologize to him.”

Clyburn said he also wants Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), who admits to yelling “it’s a baby killer” when Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) was speaking about the health care reconciliation bill Sunday, to apologize to the full chamber.

“I don’t think they [Republicans] have enough respect for the House to do it,” Clyburn said, but both parties then risk more erosion in the chamber.

He and other Democrats have pointed to a highly unusual incident Sunday afternoon, when Republicans on the floor rose and clapped in support of anti-health-care-bill protesters being removed from the visitors gallery by Capitol police.

“Two people [were] in the balcony jeering, disrupting the proceedings on the floor. Then they stand up and clap for them, 10 or 12 of them, might have been more,” Clyburn said. “I saw them applauding — they were not behind the rail. They were in the rows.”

“Those people up there were violating the rules, but they were being egged on by people down [on the floor] who were violating House rules.”