Opinion: U.S. House member loses his cool
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Apparently, what happened to Cynthia McKinney last year after a highly publicized run-in with a Capitol Police officer didn’t sink in throughout the halls of Congress. Come Monday, one of the first orders of business for Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut will be personally apologizing to an officer he flared at late last week.
The Hartford Courant’s David Lightman had the story, complete with Shays’ contrite admission that he done wrong.
In a nutshell, it seems Shays lost his cool because, initially, he believed the officer hadn’t made a better effort to help him connect with some constituents in the Capitol complex. The result, Lightman reported, was ‘a profanity-laced altercation ... during which (Shays) reached to touch the officer’s nametag.’
Later, the Republican issued a statement with his apology. And he said he hopes to meet with the officer he accosted to express his regrets when Congress reconvenes next week.
McKinney --- Shays’ one-time colleague in the House --- lost the Democratic primary in her Georgia district last summer largely due to the fallout over an incident months earlier in which she allegedly struck a Capitol Police officer with her cellphone after he stopped her as she bypassed a security checkpoint. A grand jury declined to indict her but, politically, she was toast.
It didn’t help McKinney that she already was a controversial figure. And the flap involving Shays, a 20-year House member, likely won’t escalate because of his steps to defuse it.
Still, it’s not as if he’s in any position to tempt political fate. In the 2006 Democratic wave that swept much of the nation, Shays barely won reelection. Indeed, in the six New England states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine), he’s the last Republican standing in the House --- Democrats occupy all of the region’s 21 other seats.
-- Don Frederick