‘Sign of the Times’: Lawmakers Desperately Want to End the Censure Wars

First Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez moved to formally reprimand her Democratic colleague, Rep. Chuy García, for a succession scheme.

Then conservative Rep. Ralph Norman moved to censure Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett for her communications with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Then GOP Rep. Nancy Mace moved to censure her Republican colleague, Rep. Cory Mills, over accusations of domestic violence, corruption and stolen valor.

Now Rep. Greg Steube will move to expel Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick after a grand jury indicted her for allegedly using stolen federal emergency funds for her campaign.

And that was just this week.

The House’s return to session after the shutdown has led to an explosion of drama and tension between rank-and-file members that had been bottled up during lawmakers’ 54-day recess while the government was closed.

House members, who hadn’t been in the Capitol together since Sept. 19, began airing out grievances on the floor, using procedural tools once reserved for the most extreme cases against members but have now become the norm this Congress.

Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday evening he is not “in favor” of lawmakers using those tools as a means to attack each other.

“I think censure is an extraordinary remedy. In extraordinary cases it should be used sparingly, as it has been over the history of this institution, and we want to honor that tradition and do it right,” Johnson said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Thursday he was open to supporting the effort to raise the threshold for censures and blamed Republicans for the rising temperature in the chamber.

“I’m open-minded about what the possibilities are in terms of getting the Congress out of this repeated effort by Republicans to censure members,” Jeffries told reporters. “What have Republicans done to make life better or meet the needs of the American people in any way, shape or form throughout this Congress? The answer is nada, nothing. They’ve done nothing. And so all their members do is cook up these unhinged censure resolutions, literally week after week after week.”

But it’s not just Republicans who have pursued censure this week. Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democrat, and over 100 House Democrats backed Mace’s resolution to censure Mills.

Members of both parties told NOTUS they are over the drama — but that the other party is responsible for starting it.

“I would love to see it stop,” Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman told NOTUS. “It’s just a sign of the times. This place is disintegrating under this majority. It’s just one food fight after another.”

“There’s just no adult supervision right now, institutionally,” he added. “And I hope that that’s something that we can restore. It’s a hell of a lot easier to break it than it is to restore it.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told NOTUS he would prefer to let the Ethics Committee handle member discipline.

“We can let the Ethics Committee handle these matters, so we’re not having to vote every day on somebody and something new,” he said.

Two lawmakers, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia and Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, will introduce a measure that would raise the vote threshold to 60% for any measure to censure, disapprove of conduct or remove committee assignments, NOTUS has learned. Republican leadership has suggested it would be supportive.

“The censure process in the House is broken — all of us know it,” they wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter circulating Thursday morning and obtained by NOTUS. “Historically such measures were reserved for rare, unique cases following a lengthy process that allowed time for investigations to establish facts and allow accused members a fair defense.”

“That process has been upended,” they said.

Johnson told reporters he is interested in an effort to change the threshold but isn’t sure how best to handle it yet.

“We live in the age of social media, 24-hour news cycles, and it’s a different dynamic now than it was in previous generations of congresses, so we’ve got to adjust accordingly,” Johnson said.

The top Democrat on the House Rules Committee sounded lukewarm to the idea of upping the censure threshold, saying that he supports reform but thinks the House should weigh multiple proposals to take down the rhetorical temperature.

“We have an Ethics Committee for a reason,” Rep. Jim McGovern told NOTUS. “If it’s not working, then we ought to revisit the process. But I want to make sure that we’re not just bringing things to the floor willy-nilly or just based on partisan passions.”

“I want to make sure that we’re bringing things to the floor in a responsible way,” he continued. “People who do bad things need to be held accountable but we have to have a process that has some integrity.”

Until this week, the House had only successfully censured one lawmaker this Congress. That’s Democratic Rep. Al Green, whom the House reprimanded for disrupting President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. But members have repeatedly attempted — and failed — to use the censure this year. That includes efforts to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar for sharing a video about Charlie Kirk and Rep. LaMonica McIver for a scuffle with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, a former member of Democratic leadership who is known to be an institutionalist among his colleagues, called the repeated censures “ridiculous.”

“We’ve got to resolve them and stop,” he added about the so-called “censure wars,” adding, “Because we will diminish the importance of them.”