Say Anything Blog

And while DeMint seems to be trying to make nice over it, Dorgan’s still pretty ticked.  Red-in-the-face, shouting-at-other-people pissed off. 

But the really funny reason is why Dorgan is ticked.  It wasn’t so much that DeMint was late, but that he was late because he was busy trying to kill one of Dorgan’s pork bills and then had the temerity to offer one of Dorgan’s own pieces of legislation up as an amendment.

After pounding each other with insults in a dramatic public display a day earlier, Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) buried the hatchet yesterday. Sort of. Maybe. It depends on whom you ask.

DeMint tells us he and Dorgan have agreed to settle their nasty spat at Tuesday’s committee markup of legislation to reauthorize the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a “staff” misunderstanding. Dorgan, however, says: “There’s no misunderstanding from me. It was stunningly inappropriate for him to do what he did.”

DeMint showed up late at Tuesday’s markup—because he was on the Senate floor trying to kill Dorgan’s Indian health-care bill—and offered an unrelated drug re-importation amendment to the consumer product bill, which he opposes. DeMint’s amendment was not even his own—it was the text of a bill written by Dorgan and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine).

Dorgan, typically calm, was irate. He gave his South Carolina colleague a tongue-lashing unlike any previously heard from him. Red-faced, he wouldn’t hear DeMint’s apology for being late. He told his South Carolina colleague he had shown a “stunning lack of courtesy,” characterizing DeMint’s action as plagiarizing his legislation. DeMint, a first-term senator, had no place to hide as the entire room watched.

“There’s no hugging after an incident like that,” Dorgan told On the Hill yesterday. Then again, he said, “the Senate is not a place where you hold grudges. . . . You can’t carry these over for weeks and months.”

Then Dorgan—no grudge-holder, mind you—said: “It was stunningly inappropriate for [DeMint] to do what he did. But he hasn’t been here that long. Hopefully he won’t do it again.”

Plagiarizing is a pretty serious crime, but you really have to wonder why Dorgan would be so upset at DeMint for offering up some of Dorgan’s own legislation.  Does he not want that stuff to pass or what?