11th
fruitcake
“In mid-2003, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, attempted to rush a ninety-page pension reform bill through his committee. Having not had an opportunity to read the bill, Democrats fled the committee room to review the legislation in an adjacent library. An irate Thomas called for an immediate vote, and passed the bill with only one Democrat, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), still in the room. When Stark objected to Thomas’s tactics, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Col.), a majority party committee member and Thomas’s ally, told Stark to ‘shut up’. The 71-year-old Stark challenged McInnis, twenty-one years his junior, to ‘make him’ shut up and then repeatedly called him a ‘little fruitcake’. Chairman Thomas took the unusual step of calling the Capitol Police to subdue Stark and eject the Democrats from the library.” (Heatherington 2009, 413).
