The Republican senator Markwayne Mullin claimed that by offering to fight a union leader at a congressional hearing, he was merely representing “Oklahoma values”.
Told by the Fox News host Sean Hannity “any other response” to Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters “would have been a little gutless”, Mullin said: “I would agree. I mean, wouldn’t people want me to do that?
“If I didn’t do that, people in Oklahoma would be pretty upset at me. I represent Oklahoma values.”
The confrontation in a Senate labor committee hearing came after Mullin read out a tweet in which O’Brien, after a previous clash, called him a clown and a fraud and said: “Quit the tough guy act.”
Mullin did not quit the tough guy act, moving towards O’Brien as the committee chair, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, sought to establish order.
It was not the only such incident on Tuesday. Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy was accused of elbowing Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who voted to remove McCarthy last month.
McCarthy denied it. Media outlets surfaced claims by Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, that McCarthy twice barged into him.
Mullin said: “I’m a guy from Oklahoma first, and in Oklahoma you don’t do this. Maybe you run your mouth in New Jersey, I don’t know, I’m not from New Jersey.”
O’Brien is not from New Jersey. He is from Massachusetts.
Mullin continued: “But this is a mob boss, and you’re supposed to be intimidated because he’s the boss of the Teamsters.
“You’re not going to run your mouth at me and expect me to sit there. And you should have seen the fear in his eyes when I stood up. I’m not joking. I’m not looking for a fight. I used to get paid to fight professionally, but I’m not going to sit back and let somebody do that and not call them out on it.”
Mullin was once a professional mixed martial arts fighter.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, O’Brien was unrepentant, telling CNN Mullin was “one of 100 of the most powerful people in the country … acting like a 12-year-old in a schoolyard because [he] didn’t get [his] way”.
In a separate Fox interview, Mullin blamed Sanders for bringing O’Brien to the hearing, and said: “Keep in mind too, this isn’t anything new. [President] Andrew Jackson challenged two people or nine people to a duel when he was president and he also knocked one guy out at a White House dinner.”
Jackson, president between 1829 and 1837, was a prodigious and lethal duelist.
Mullin added: “There have been canings before in the Senate too.”
On 22 May 1856, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, thrashed and almost killed Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator.
“Maybe we should bring some of that back,” Mullin said. “You know, keep people from thinking they’re so tough and … we can actually work out our differences without poking at each other and wanting to run the cameras and call people names. Maybe if we have some type of respect, because we know there’s going to be consequences for your actions.”
Joanne B Freeman of Yale, author of The Field of Blood, a study of congressional violence before the civil war, was not impressed.
“This was what southern congressmen said in the 1840s and 1850s,” Freeman said. “Dueling was good because people watched their words if they thought they might get shot for them.
“In 2023, consequences SHOULD be you get called out for such threats by allies who expose such nonsense for what it is.”
