Democrat Steny Hoyer Regrets Calling Tea Party Protests 'Un-American'

WASHINGTON (April 22) -- House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said today that he regretted calling vocal opponents of health care reform "un-American" but compared the angry rhetoric of some Republican leaders who goad them on to the fiery rantings of a controversial Depression-era priest sympathetic to the Nazis.

"That was not a good phrase, not a good use of language. It was not correct," the Maryland Democrat said of an op-ed column he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in USA Today last summer. The article was a response to protesters who disrupted town hall meetings on their party's health care reform proposals, hanging members of Congress in effigy and railing against "death panels."

Hoyer told reporters that while "there are some activities that are not consistent with civil engagement," he said he regretted having read the column too quickly before approving it.

Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is apologizing for a column he co-wrote in which he said, "Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American."

The outspoken majority leader was unapologetic about the "progress, not success" that President Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress has made to slow and start reversing the Great Recession that began in the final months of the Bush administration. But he acknowledged the public mood amid stubbornly high unemployment and foreclosures.

"People are angry about it who believe it was beyond their control and they have been put in a position by people who have power, whether they're bankers, politicians," he said, noting that with George W. Bush off the scene, many are focused on blaming Obama.

"It is not unusual. Father Coughlin came about during the Depression," he said, referring to the anti-Semitic radio commentator who used his weekly broadcasts to attack President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. "But Father Coughlin didn't have the e-mail. He didn't have blogs. He didn't have Twitter. He didn't have Fox News to promote the most confrontational, least-helpful dialogue and demagoguery that we are confronting the American people with, and I think that's not useful. I think we are losing the civility of our debate."

Hoyer also reiterated his criticism of rhetoric like that used at a rally for Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin in Minneapolis in which Democrats were called a "lying, thieving ... bunch of commies."

Those words, he said, were "not very helpful and certainly incites people to great anger and confrontation, and I would suggest to you not very useful in terms of thoughtful analysis of how we get to where we want to get."