The First Rule of Congress is You Do Not Talk About Congress

On elected officials, mixed martial arts, cage fighting & biting.

If you tuned into C-SPAN on Tuesday to watch the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearings (or the aptly named acronym HELP), you would’ve seen a red-faced Bernie Sanders yelling, “We are not here to talk about cage-fighting!”

Bet you weren’t ready for that. I mean, you get your coffee in the morning and settle into the workday but instead of being being normal and listening to a true crime podcast, you’re watching C-SPAN. And, on Tuesday, it looked something like this.

This may either be the floor of the U.S. Capitol or a heated parliamentary debate in Kosovo.

The altercation was between Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma who apparently moonlights as a mixed martial arts fighter, and Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters who decidedly does not moonlight as a mixed martial arts fighter.

The very same day, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy purposely elbowed Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who had voted to oust him from his speakerdom, in the back. This incident, however, is basically a footnote. When asked about it, McCarthy replied, “If I would hit somebody, they would know I hit them.”

SICK BURN. Who knew that McCarthy was such a badass? I just hope that Burchett will make a full recovery from what must have been a debilitating schoolyard injury. Prayers.

But back to the cage match. Sen. Markwayne Mullin is a trained MMA fighter, whose mother put both “Mark” and “Wayne” as first names on his birth certificate and then forgot to pick just one. You think I’m joking.

Not that I should talk. When I left the hospital, my birth certificate read Baby Girl Smith. First name, Baby. Middle name, Girl. Last name, Smith. My parents couldn’t decide on a name because they thought I was going to be a boy since they already had two girls and who wants three girls? They were going to name me Bernie after my dad Bernard. Bernie.

Those were the days when you couldn’t find out the sex beforehand so you didn’t know whether to paint the nursery pink or blue in order to perpetuate stifling gender stereotypes. (Ask me what I painted my daughter’s nursery. Pink.)

He’s no “Mighty Mouse” Johnson or even "The Last Emperor" Emelianenko.

So Markwayne was sitting on the dais at the HELP hearing when he stood up and challenged Sean O’Brien, who was testifying at the time, to a fight. To put it in context, the senator was none too happy about a few of O’Brien’s tweets calling him a “clown” and a “fraud” as well as a grown man with two first names.

“Sir, this is a time, this is a place,” Mullins said. “You want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.” To which O’Brien responded, “OK, that’s fine! Perfect!”

Seriously? “Two consenting adults” sounds like they’ll be doing more than just fighting.

“You want to do it now?” Mullin asked. “Stand your butt up, then.”

And then O’Brien said, “You stand your butt up, then!”

Then Bernie Sanders, also an MMA fighter, cut in, reminding Mullin that he’s a U.S. senator and that the two retirees watching C-SPAN could very well start tying up the call lines.

Following the contentious hearing, O’Brien tweeted, “You want to fight me? Let’s have coffee, discuss our differences.” Hold up. Having coffee and discussing differences is not a fight. It’s a klatch.

But Markwayne was far from done, saying he wasn’t sorry and (not that anyone asked) that he wasn’t afraid of biting. “I’ll bite 100%. In a fight, I’m gonna bite. I’ll do anything. I’m not above it. And I don’t care where I bite by the way, it just is gonna be a bite.”

I’m pretty confident that coffee date has been called off.