Censure fever

The government is back to work, and lawmakers are busy  – attacking each other.  While on the surface, this keeps them messing up other things, it also means they are spending a lot of time not doing what they are supposed to. The perfect example of a mixed blessing, I guess. Not a good look for Speaker Johnson.

His members instead spent much of their first full week back after the shutdown sniping at each other and using the House floor to carry out attacks on colleagues. Lawmakers voted five times on measures to rebuke other members, eating up hours of floor time.

The spasms of personal pique crossed party lines, with Democrats targeting Democrats and Republicans targeting Republicans in some cases. It left at least a few lawmakers fuming about the depths of the House’s dysfunction and looking for ways to address it.

An effort by a fellow Democrat to rebuke Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.) over his apparent scheme to install his top aide as his successor succeeded Tuesday. A Republican effort targeting Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.) over her communications with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein narrowly failed, as did a GOP-led effort to censure Rep. Cory Mills(R-Fla.) over various alleged ethical misdeeds.

The Plaskett and Mills measures failed in part because of a small but vocal group of lawmakers determined to put a stop to the tit-for-tat floor antics before they spiraled into something even more disruptive.

Two of them — Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.) — introduced legislation Thursday that would change House rules to make it harder for members to target colleagues, warning that the chamber is at risk of devolving into an irreparable cycle of caustic personal brawling.

In addition to the five votes on Garcia, Plaskett and Mills, House leaders also worked to try and fend off an effort to censure or expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), who was indicted Wednesday on federal fraud charges. She has called the indictment an “unjust, baseless sham.”MSN

Cherfilus-McCormick, you may recall, has been indicted for stealing $5,000,000 in disaster relief funds. She blames it all on racism – threw that card already. Headline USA

Formerly the procedure was that a member’s alleged actions were submitted to the House Ethics Committee, who decided whether to censure. Now, it seems people want to make the process faster.

Instead, they are registering more concern about a recent spate of censures that have been doled out across party lines to lawmakers who have engaged in behavior that is crude, distasteful or simply objectionable to their political enemies.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), for instance, was censured in 2021 under a Democratic majority for posting an animated video depicting the murder of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). When Republicans retook the chamber, GOP members targeted Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for his role in investigating President Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russia and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for comments about Israel, among others.

It’s not like the House has more important things to do… like, say, submitting a real budget?

Some in the House were unhappy that Mills avoided censure. We’re gonna talk a little more about him tomorrow.