Apology Ends Much Ado Over Vulgar Insult in Assembly

SACRAMENTO —  Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles) called a Republican assemblyman from Chico a “[expletive] moron” Thursday at an emotional committee hearing.

Complaints over Murray’s remark aimed at Bernie Richter later spilled onto the Assembly floor, where the entire house debated whether an apology was in order.

Murray finally apologized, making a vote unnecessary.

While Assemblywoman Barbara Alby (R-Fair Oaks), who heard the remark, pushed for the apology, others treated the episode more lightly.

Richter said later that he was not offended and joked that the expletive Murray used to describe him was erroneous because “I had prostate surgery two years ago.”

The blowup began at a meeting of the Assembly Rules Committee, on which Murray and Alby sit. Richter sought a rule waiver to introduce a resolution on the Assembly floor commemorating an eloquent denunciation of racial segregation made 100 years ago by a Supreme Court justice.

The committee ruled that Richter could bring up his resolution on Monday. Resolutions call for debate and a vote of the house, but have no binding authority.

Richter is the Assembly’s leading opponent of affirmative action policies. He argues that it is just as wrong for government to favor minorities by granting them preferences for jobs and school admissions as it was for governments to abide discrimination by whites against blacks and other minorities in the past.

Richter’s resolution honors Justice John Marshall Harlan, who wrote the dissenting opinion in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine allowing segregated treatment of African Americans. Harlan declared in his opinion that “our Constitution is colorblind” and that “all citizens are equal before the law,” ideals that were adopted in later court decisions and acts of Congress.

Murray, who is black, said in an interview that Richter’s public acclaim for the Harlan dissent, coupled with his fight to scrap affirmative action policies, represented “a vile and insulting twist of logic for African Americans” that caused him to blurt out the remark after Richter had left the Rules Committee room.

“While you try to have a certain decorum” as an Assembly member sitting on a committee, he said, “sometimes you just get to the end of your rope when illogical arguments are used to further something you vehemently oppose.”

Murray noted that besides his apology on the floor of the Assembly, he apologized in the Rules Committee room after making his remark, which he said “I sort of just muttered.”

However, all who were present in the small hearing room heard Murray, and his words were recorded and entered into the official record of the Rules Committee proceedings.