Former House Speaker John Boehner made headlines last fall for revealing Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, once put a knife to his throat during a debate over earmarks. Young confirmed the account at the time, but wants one thing clarified.
“The blade was not open, so it wasn’t a direct threat,” he said this week, speaking on an episode of Rep. Sean Duffy’s, R-Wis., lumberjack-themed talkshow “Plaidcast,” an early copy of which was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Asked by Duffy to verify the story, Young reached into his pocket, retrieved a knife, and re-enacted the incident, using the bemused Wisconsin Republican as a stand-in for Boehner. “He crossed me, and I had a knife, it was like this,” Young explained, holding the closed blade to Duffy’s neck, “it was ten inches long, and I went up to him, and I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.'”
“The blade was not open, so it wasn’t a direct threat,” Young emphasized, adding ominously, “The second time, it would have been more than that.”
Young, the longest-serving member of Congress, is good friends with Boehner, who was the best man at his wedding in 2015. “This was some of the friendly back and forth banter John and I had over a few decades, but it was never anything serious. Had it been, I’m sure you would’ve heard about it long before now,” he wrote on Facebook after the incident was originally reported by Politico last October.
Recalling a dinner to which the Alaska Republican once brought multiple knives, Duffy asked, “Do you actually carry your knives on the House floor?”
“Oh, all the time. I don’t go without them,” Young, a 46-year veteran of Congress, replied.
Questioned on whether carrying knives on the House floor was “lawful,” Young said no.
Duffy pressed him:
DUFFY: So you’re breaking the law every day.
YOUNG: No, I’m not breaking a law. I think it’s what you call survival law.
DUFFY: Or keeping the Congress safe?
YOUNG: Keeping the Congress safe, you’re absolutely right.
As for earmarks, the original source of his conflict with Boehner, Young hasn’t changed his mind one bit. “Anyone who says we don’t need earmarks is smoking dope,” he told Duffy in the episode.
