NYT : Democrat Escapes Censure Over Remarks About Bush and War

Democrat Escapes Censure Over Remarks About Bush and War

By DAVID STOUT | October 23, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California, escaped censure today for incendiary remarks he made last Thursday about President Bush and the war in Iraq.

By 196 to 173, the House voted to table a resolution to censure Mr. Stark, who is chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, for what he said as the House sustained President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand a children’s health insurance program.

“You don’t have money to fund the war or children,” Mr. Stark told Republicans last week. “But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people, if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, called Mr. Stark’s remark “despicable and beneath contempt.” Other Republicans expressed similar shock.

But Mr. Stark’s comment, for which he has apologized, was hardly out of character. The Almanac of American Politics notes that in March 2003, the Bay Area lawmaker called the bombing of Iraq “an act of extreme terrorism” and that he “has had testy personal dealings” in his 17 terms in Congress.

Indeed. The political almanac recalls that, at a committee hearing in May 2001, Mr. Stark declared — incorrectly — that all the children of then-Representative J. C. Watts, an Oklahoma Republican, had been born out of wedlock. When Mr. Watts confronted him face to face, Mr. Stark further angered him with a flippant remark, a gesture that might have been a tad reckless, given that Mr. Watts was a football star at the University of Oklahoma and is a few decades younger than Mr. Stark.

In July 2003, when Mr. Stark and other Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee huddled in a room next to the committee room, the Capitol Police were called by the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative Bill Thomas of California, to evict them. Mr. Stark reacted by calling Mr. Thomas a “fascist.”

Last week, in the immediate fallout from his latest eyebrow-raiser, Mr. Stark wasnot exactly apologetic. “I have nothing but respect for our brave men and women in uniform and wish them the very best,” said Mr. Stark, who served in the Air Force from 1955 to 1957 and will celebrate his 76th birthday on Veterans Day. “But I respect neither the Commander-in-Chief who keeps them in harm’s way nor the chickenhawks in Congress who vote to deny children health care.”

The 196 House members who voted today to table the censure resolution — putting off consideration indefinitely, in effect killing the resolution — were all fellow Democrats. Five Democrats joined 168 Republicans in voting not to table it. Another 8 Democrats voted “present,” and 55 members did not vote.

Today, Mr. Stark sounded contrite. “I want to apologize to, first of all, my colleagues, many of whom I’ve offended; the president, his family; to the troops that may have found in my remarks, as were suggested in the motion that we just voted on, and I do apologize,” he said. “I hope that with this apology I will become as insignificant as I should be, and that we can return to the issues that do divide us, but that we can resolve in a better fashion.

“I yield back the balance of my time,” he concluded, to applause.