The former G.O.P. speaker elbowed one of the Republicans who had voted to oust him. A Republican senator rose to challenge an organized labor leader to a brawl during a hearing. Across the Capitol, the chairman of a different panel compared a member of his committee to a cartoon character.
Tensions ran high on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as the marbled corridors of Congress devolved into a backdrop for heated clashes — some of them physical — among lawmakers who are rushing to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the week and salvage their Thanksgiving vacation.
The fights were the latest display of unruliness from a branch of government that has spent much of the year wallowing in its own dysfunction, only snapping out of it for long enough to narrowly avert a federal debt default and a lapse in government funding. This week appeared to be one of those times — the House was expected on Tuesday afternoon to pass a temporary bill to stave off a shutdown at week’s end — but lawmakers were still behaving badly.
It began early Tuesday morning, when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a run-in with Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the eight Republicans who had voted to oust him from the speakership last month, in the basement of the Capitol. Mr. Burchett said he had been speaking with journalists in a hallway following a party confab when Mr. McCarthy elbowed him in the back, then kept walking.
“It was just a cheap shot by a bully,” Mr. Burchett said…
