Engaging in Personalities

Everyone around me on the House floor started yelling and I didn’t know why.

Last week - during the protracted Speaker fight - there was a moment on the House floor when a member of the majority party was giving a speech and all of the sudden everyone around me started yelling and I didn't understand why.

Turns out, the person giving the speech had made a reference to members of the other party having "popcorn and alcohol" on the House floor.

For the record, I didn't see anyone with alcohol and to my knowledge there was none.

But the accusation was made.

And as soon as it happened, everyone around me started yelling, "Take it down! Take it down!”

What I didn’t realize is that there's actually a rule against making this kind of accusation: Members of Congress are not allowed to "engage in personalities" while speaking on the House floor.

What does engaging in personalities mean?

There’s no definition. It's just the Speaker's call when someone crosses the line.

I looked up the history and it's actually very rare. Remarkably, it only happens once every couple of years.

Examples include:

Calling someone a "hypocrite."

Or a "little bugger."

Or "sneaky."

Or rhyming someone's name with the word “baloney.”

Or accusing someone of "stealing an election." (And it wasn’t the election you’re thinking of...)

Even calling someone "impolite" has been deemed rude enough to break the rules.

It really doesn't take much.

Which means that accusing members of having alcohol when they really didn't might have broken those rules. If it had, the punishment would be to have those words “taken down” which means they would be stricken from the congressional record and the member would be forcefully reminded of the rules.

But here's the thing:

We didn't have any rules.

The rules only get adopted after you elect a Speaker and this all happened while we were fighting over who the Speaker was going to be.

Which meant we were in this odd limbo where we were sort of operating under the rules from the last Congress, but if someone broke the rules it wasn’t clear if there could be any enforcement - as there wound up not being for the fearsome alcohol accusation.

That's also why there were members taking selfies on the floor and yelling, "No rules!" while they did it - because taking selfies on the House floor is usually against the rules. 

(By the way, there was a ton of selfie action. Everyone got their fill.)

So if you ever see members of Congress on cable TV just trashing each other, please know that they are perfectly capable of disagreeing within the bounds of basic respect while on the House floor - they just choose to behave differently sometimes on TV.

Which brings us to the question:

When was the last time you engaged in personalities?

Best,

Jeff Jackson (NC-14)

P.S. - Avery runs through the Capitol tunnel to catch a vote. She better hurry - there’s only a 15-minute window…