A congressman was escorted off the House floor after donning a hooded sweatshirt in protest of the killing of Trayvon Martin, an African-American Florida teen.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) was forced off the House floor after giving a speech in which he denounced the sort of racial profiling which appears to have led to 17-year-old Martin being gunned down in his Sanford, Fla., neighborhood.

Martin’s death has sparked national outrage and protest, as well as multiple investigations into the incident — including a federal probe by the Justice Department. The alleged shooter in the incident remains free and hasn’t been charged, due to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” statute. That state law has come under intense scrutiny since Martin’s death.

“Just because someone wears a hoodie, does not make them a hoodlum. Just because someone is young and wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum. Just because someone is a young black male and wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” says Rush, a member of Congress for 20 years, and also an African-American. “A hood on the head does not mean a hood in the head.”

Rush began quoting Bible verse, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and dark sunglasses.

He finished by saying, “I urge all who hear these words to heed this lesson. May God bless Trayvon Martin’s soul, his parents and family, and may God bless us all.”

The presiding officer of the House began gaveling Rush out of order almost immediately after Rush pulled his hood up over his head, because House rules ban the wearing of hats.

Shortly thereafter, the lawmaker was escorted off the floor.

WATCH VIDEO OF THE RUSH SPEECH HERE:

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Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Nancy Pelosi warns that the work of the so-called deficit supercommittee "cannot be the product of secrecy."

Even as lawmakers wrangle over the details of the work of the so-called supercommittee, the top House Democrat is calling for more openness in the decision-making of the bipartisan deficit-reduction panel.

Created by last summer’s federal debt deal, the members of the supercommittee have just until Thanksgiving to find $1.2 trillion over 10 years in deficit-reduction.

Members of the panel, known officially as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, have been conducting all of their important negotiating entirely behind closed doors.

Predictable partisan jostling began this week as details of those talks began coming public.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi warned that the final package put forward by the 12-member supercommittee “cannot be a product of secrecy.”

“You know, they may want to narrow issues that will be made that judgments have to be made over, but that has to be done in a public way. And I think you are you absolutely right; in order for our Members to embrace this, they have to know more about it and know why it has come to the place that it has,” she told a reporter Thursday. “And we hope that it will be, as I said, big, bold, and balanced, but, at some point, the discussion has to be more public.”

Pelosi is only the highest ranking lawmaker to complain about the super-secrecy of the supercommittee. Others also have already done so. However, the Deficit Committee Transparency Act, which would require final committee recommendations to be made publicly available online for at least 72 hours before a committee vote, has just five cosponsors in the House and has not even been introduced in the Senate.

Supercommittee members might want to remain private as they narrow their issues down to what the “real decisions will be,” but hammering out those final recommendations “should be in the public domain.”

Pelosi named three Democrats to the supercommittee, Reps. Xavier Becerra of California, James Clyburn of South Carolina, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.

She says she continues to have “great confidence” in those three members.

“They have knowledge, they have judgment. They share the values of our Caucus, and they know that we want to have an agreement, a big agreement,” Pelosi says.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.