Todd Zwillich, for The Takeaway: Congresswoman Richardson, why did you vote YES on the resolution yesterday?

Rep. Laura Richardson (D-California): First of all, good morning and thanks for having me on your show. The reason I voted YES was what Representative Wilson did was his behavior was inappropriate. We had millions of people watching the joint [address to] Congress: men, women, and children, and so on. And it’s inappropriate for people to yell out, interrupt when someone is talking, and to also personally attack them with name calling. And if we’re really going to have a serious debate in this country, we’ve got to demonstrate that with ourselves in Congress. And I think the town halls across this country over the last several months have reached to a rhetoric that is basically unacceptable. And for us as a Congress to participate in it as well, we’re just as much at fault. So, yesterday was about saying, 'look, we might have differences but we don’t have to be disagreeable.'

ZWILLICH: So, you want to draw a line between the House floor and the outside world? Because of course what has been re-reported in the last few days was when President Bush was President, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, did call him a liar. He didn’t do it on the Senate floor. That wasn’t very civil. Is the difference here the chamber floor or is it a double-standard for the Senate and the House or for Democrats and Republicans? What’s the distinction here?

RICHARDSON: Well the distinction, first of all, is the behavior that goes on on the floor. We have specific rules. Parliamentary procedure rules about how we are supposed to conduct ourselves while we are on the floor. And so clearly Mr. Wilson did not perform in that behavior. In addition to that, there’s a way that we carry ourselves at all times and no one should be doing name calling with the President. These issues are very emotional and very difficult. And I think if people reach to the level of name calling, even with President Bush, we should respect the office that he holds. There are some serious concerns about what he and Vice-President Cheney did but we should all still carry ourselves in an appropriate way and calling someone a liar I think goes too far.

ZWILLICH: Well the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, initially did not really want to touch this. There’s kind of a traveling side-show that seems to follow the President wherever he goes, whether it is talk of death panels or the Louis Henry Gates scandal – the Beer Summit, educational speech – a lot of things that seem to have thrown the President off-message. And it appears the Speaker didn’t want to help throw the President off-message. But, Congresswoman, your whip, Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina had a different view on this.
Let’s hear from him: [on tape] We, at a minimum, are duty bound to express our disapproval.

ZWILLICH: Now, a lot of your colleagues, especially members of the Congressional Black Caucus, did see a racial element to Joe Wilson’s outburst. Did you hear any of those sentiments on the House floor? Was this purely about protecting the integrity of House decorum? Or were you hearing complaints about rebuking what people saw as a racial motivation?

RICHARDSON: No, when I was on the floor people were not talking about race. People were talking about how Representative Wilson disrespected the President of The United States. All you have to do is turn on the television and look at some of the horrible pictures, some of the things that are being said, and people are going too far. And that’s what it clearly was about. We have to respect the office. If we want to say something different there is a medium to do so. But to scream out and yell and disrespect the President’s speech is inappropriate. And to do name calling on top of it is just wrong. And it’s not about the race; it’s about how we should behave.

ZWILLICH: Well, the House has always been a slightly more raucous place than the Senate; slightly less raucous than the British Parliament. Congresswoman Laura Richardson from the 37th district in Los Angeles and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, thank you for joining us.

RICHARDSON: Thank you for having me.