Dorgan and DeMint Make Up for Appearances' Sake, but There's No Hugging

After pounding each other with insults in a dramatic public display a day earlier, Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) buried the hatchet yesterday. Sort of. Maybe. It depends on whom you ask.

DeMint tells us he and Dorgan have agreed to settle their nasty spat at Tuesday's committee markup of legislation to reauthorize the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a "staff" misunderstanding. Dorgan, however, says: "There's no misunderstanding from me. It was stunningly inappropriate for him to do what he did."

DeMint showed up late at Tuesday's markup -- because he was on the Senate floor trying to kill Dorgan's Indian health-care bill -- and offered an unrelated drug re-importation amendment to the consumer product bill, which he opposes. DeMint's amendment was not even his own -- it was the text of a bill written by Dorgan and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine).

Dorgan, typically calm, was irate. He gave his South Carolina colleague a tongue-lashing unlike any previously heard from him. Red-faced, he wouldn't hear DeMint's apology for being late. He told his South Carolina colleague he had shown a "stunning lack of courtesy," characterizing DeMint's action as plagiarizing his legislation. DeMint, a first-term senator, had no place to hide as the entire room watched.

"There's no hugging after an incident like that," Dorgan told On the Hill yesterday. Then again, he said, "the Senate is not a place where you hold grudges. . . . You can't carry these over for weeks and months."

Then Dorgan -- no grudge-holder, mind you -- said: "It was stunningly inappropriate for [DeMint] to do what he did. But he hasn't been here that long. Hopefully he won't do it again."

DeMint's spokesman, Wesley Denton, says Democrats were the ones who behaved inappropriately by refusing to allow DeMint to offer an amendment during markup, even if the senator was late. "It's pretty underhanded what happened yesterday," Denton told us. "Even though Senator DeMint is tough on his policies, he's very gentlemanly."

DeMint, who has angered both sides of the aisle at times this year with his anti-earmark crusade, says he and Dorgan are now square. They settled the matter face to face on the Senate floor as a "staff" miscommunication that led DeMint to believe he was supposed to offer the amendment.

But Dorgan doesn't know where DeMint got that idea. He says neither he nor Snowe gave DeMint permission to offer that amendment as his own. "He shouldn't offer other people's amendments," Dorgan scoffed.

"We don't agree on much," DeMint told On the Hill. But he said those ideological differences weren't the root cause of the dust-up.

So does that mean the two will be going out to dinner together anytime soon? DeMint just smiled and walked away.

California Angel

The bipartisan Halloween spirit also found its way onto the heads of the chairman and ranking minority member of the Environment and Public Works Committee: Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.).