"I am the new president of the Congress," said Arturo Soto Aguirre, a right-wing congressman who was perhaps elected on Sunday night after the incumbent, Jose Lobo Dubon, walked out of a tumultuous session to avoid being ousted.

Years ago, Darrell Issa, the right-wing millionaire congressman from San Diego who bankrolled the recall drive, was arrested twice on car theft charges.

I don't like how, when confronted with a court ruling they disagree with, right-wing congressmen go on television and do the very thing that the courts just outlawed.

Outside the military academy this morning, for instance, Iván Moreira, a right-wing congressman, was arguing to all who would listen that General Pinochet was not a brutal executioner but "a great statesman and liberator, the man who saved Chile from Marxism and avoided a war."

Sestak criticized Toomey by calling him "Pennsylvania's most right-wing congressman".

He soon established himself as one of the House's most conservative members, leading a small but growing cluster of right-wing congressmen who had cut their teeth in the fledgling conservative intellectual movement of the early 1960s and drew their inspiration from Goldwater's presidential campaign.

That ruling suggested that the Supreme Court did not respond to subtle pressures from the military and right-wing congressmen, as some human rights advocates had feared.