Senators generally refrain from impugning their colleagues on the floor, a practice codified in Senate Rule XIX: “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”
The penalty for breaching that rule is to be ordered to take one’s seat — in effect, to sit down and shut up. But no senator rose to make a point of order before Cruz left the floor.
“It’s unusual, certainly,” Betty K. Koed, the Senate’s official historian, said of Cruz’s remarks. “The Senate prides itself on being an environment of polite, respectful decorum, but this happens from time to time.”
In a 1995 speech on Senate decorum, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) denounced senators who accuse their colleagues of dissembling: “The use of such maledicent language on the Senate floor is quite out of place, and to accuse other senators of being liars is to skate on very, very thin ice, indeed.”
Rule XIX was nearly invoked in 1988 after Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) accused Sen. H. John Heinz III (R-Pa.) and others of being “spokesmen” for “special interest groups.” But after Heinz rose in protest, Gramm withdrew his remarks.
Cruz’s statement would seem to be a more serious breach of floor comity than Gramm’s. But they both fall well short of other, more distant floor antics — such as the time, during debate on the Compromise of 1850, that Henry S. Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on fellow Democrat Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, or the 1902 fistfight between South Carolina Democrats Benjamin R. Tillman and John L. McLaurin.
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