House Speaker Kent Williams and Rep. Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga, say reports that the Chattanooga lawmaker sought to boot the speaker out of a closed-door House Republican Caucus meeting on Tuesday are untrue.
But Rep. McCormick, the House GOP’s assistant leader, today did acknowledge asking the speaker, who has had his differences with fellow Republicans, to “sit down and wait his turn” to address the group at one point.
The GOP Caucus was meeting Tuesday to discuss the budget and talking about a bonded indebtedness issue when the incident occurred, lawmakers said.
Rep. McCormick said when the group meets, a list is kept of members wishing to speak. House Republican Leader Jason Mumpower of Bristol first sought to keep the order of speakers in line, observers said.
“Well, Kent didn’t like something he heard, and he hopped up and just started blurting his message out of (the) line,” Rep. McCormick said, downplaying the incident. “And I asked him to sit down and wait his turn. And he took umbrage to that, shouting something at me across the room.”
The Chattanooga lawmaker said he walked over to hear what the speaker had to say “and that was about it, really. He apologized to me afterward.”
Speaker Williams, an Elizabethton Republican who angered the entire caucus when he let Democrats elect him speaker over their candidate in January, downplayed the episode. He said matters are “always intense in the Republican Caucus meeting.”
“Me and McCormick are great friends, and anytime we have words, it’s for three minutes and we kiss and make up,” said Speaker Williams, noting he was “not going to comment on it. We’re good friends and I’ll just leave it at that. I don’t want to stir anything up.”
He declined to say whether he had called Rep. McCormick “fat boy,” a phrase reported by some meeting participants.
Chuckling, Rep. McCormick said, “he called me something to have to do with fat. If I’d really hurt him I probably would have gotten mad at that point.”
For complete details, see tomorrow's Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Andy Sher is a Nashville-based staff writer covering Tennessee state government and politics for the Times Free Press. A Washington correspondent from 1999-2005 for the Times Free Press, Andy previously headed up state Capitol coverage for The Chattanooga Times, worked as a state Capitol reporter for The Nashville Banner and was a contributor to The Tennessee Journal, among other publications. Andy worked for 17 years at The Chattanooga Times covering police, health care, county government, ...
We should demand the legislature be allowed to carry guns into their sessions. If it is okay to have them in bars, then it should be okay to have them in their caucus meetings. I hope Gerald McCormick introduces this legislation soon.
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