Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images
- From screaming matches to alleged kidney shots, it's been an eventful day on Capitol Hill.
- It's the latest in Congress' centuries of history moonlighting as a sporadic fight club.
- Breaking with "Fight Club's" first two rules, though, no one in Congress is keeping it a secret.
What started as a quiet day on Capitol Hill quickly led to Congress devolving into a lame version of "Fight Club."
On Tuesday morning, an NPR reporter documented an interaction between former Republican Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Tim Burchett.
"Have NEVER seen this on Capitol Hill," Claudia Grisales wrote on X.
Grisales said that as she was speaking with Burchett following a GOP conference meeting, McCarthy "shoved" the lawmaker from Tennessee as he walked by, leading Burchett to chase after him.
"What kind of chicken move is that? You're pathetic man, you are so pathetic," Burchett reportedly told McCarthy.
Around a half-hour later, Burchett told a separate reporter he could "still feel it" after taking a "clean shot to the kidney."
McCarthy denied Burchett's recollection of the event and bragged about how hard he can punch in the process.
"If I hit somebody, they would know it," he told reporters Tuesday afternoon. "If I kidney punched someone, they would be on the ground."
GOP firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was not a witness to the altercation, later joined the fray. He's reportedly already drafted a complaint he plans to send to the House Ethics Committee.
"The rot starts at the top," Gaetz wrote.
Burchett and Gaetz both share a key vote in congressional history: They were two of the eight Republicans who voted to unexpectedly oust McCarthy from his role as speaker of the House at the beginning of October.
Separately, Rep. James Comer, who chairs the Oversight Committee and is a leader in the House GOP's push to impeach President Joe Biden, got into a screaming match on Tuesday during a hearing with Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz.
"You look like a Smurf, here, just going around and all this stuff," Comer yelled at Moskowitz after he alleged Comer had committed the same offense that he and his fellow Republicans are claiming Biden's guilty of doing: loaning $200,000 to his brother.
The House wasn't the only chamber of Congress to see brouhaha begin to brew on Tuesday.
During a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sen. Bernie Sanders shouted at a Republican senator from Oklahoma to stop after he stood up mid-hearing with the apparent intention of fighting the president of the Teamsters.
"You're a United States senator!" Sanders yelled at Sen. Markwayne Mullin, causing the junior senator to back down.
But unlike the original "Fight Club's" first two rules — "you do not talk about Fight Club" and "you DO NOT talk about Fight Club" — the Capitol's centuries of duking it out has been well-documented, like when a member of the House bludgeoned a senator with a cane until they were unconscious in 1856 or the time in 1902 when South Carolina's two senators got into a fistfight in the Senate Chamber.