It was just another Thursday in Washington.

Donald Trump was threatening to execute congressional Democrats, House members were mounting gangland-style political reprisals on one another and the following people sat next to each in the same pew at Washington’s National Cathedral to remember the life of Dick Cheney: Anthony Fauci, Rachel Maddow, Ken Mehlman and James Carville.

The former vice-president, who died earlier this month after modern medicine and a new heart let him see his grandkids become adults, would have been appalled at Trump’s conduct, amused by his coalition of the willing (mourners) and depressed by what has become of the House, where he represented Wyoming for a decade.

Cheney’s service was fittingly held the first full week his beloved House was back in session after a 54-day absence following the government shutdown. The dispiriting part is that after they reopened the government, lawmakers quickly turned on one another. Resolutions of disapproval and even expulsion were teed up, with the usual tribal, red-vs.-blue targeting of the other party — but also intra-party warfare between rival factions.

It was enough to make the bipartisan vote on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files look like a historic triumph of Article I power and legislative branch independence.

Now a decade into the Trump era, it’s easy to focus on his aberrant and indefensible behavior. In fact, we should — it’s important to not be inured to how he acts. Calling a female reporter “piggy,” treating visiting autocrats like they’re former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and saying of the Federal Reserve chair: “I’d love to fire his ass.” Which was all before he went on social media to say “Hang Them” of those Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video urging military service members to refuse illegal orders.

And that was all just this week.

Yet what’s disheartening about the breakdown of the House is it illustrates that the political rot runs deeper than just one man. Yes, Trump sets the example and has modeled the worst behavior. But we know who he is. This year makes clear, however, that the institutional decay in Washington may outlast his presidency.

Republicans have full control of the government, yet there have been more resolutions of disapproval or censure (three) voted on individual lawmakers than there have been votes on major bills (one). It has gotten so bad that a bipartisan duo is introducing legislation to raise the vote threshold to censure a member, to “raise the level of sanity in the House.”

Yes, the lack of legislative activity is in part because House members wrapped many of their priorities in legislation formerly known as the “one big, beautiful bill.”

But would any student of Congress really say this has been a productive year for the House? And could anyone tell you what their legislative priorities for the rest of this session have been since the BBB was signed in July?

And then there’s that pesky Article I language, the power distributed to Congress by the Constitution. There’s not a single member of Congress who could argue with a straight face, at least in private, that they’re acting the part of a co-equal branch.

Arriving for Cheney’s service, I encountered a former Republican congressional and White House aide, a conservative, dejected by Congress’s abdication of its authority. Had I seen, he asked, the clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month in which the speaker says he’s “cheering for the president” to win the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s power to levy tariffs without congressional approval? “I say that as a jealous guardian of the legislative branch of government,” Johnson added, irony unintended.

Not far away was John Thune, the Senate GOP Leader and a House member himself at the turn of the century. “It’s a different era,” Thune said.

“It’s a different era,” he said again, and without taking pleasure in the observation as he surveyed a sanctuary full of old guard Republicans and the Democrats doing their duty, whether out of obligation or respect for the Cheney family’s opposition to Trump after January 6.

The audience reflected the end of Cheney’s career, and the eulogists spoke of Cheney the father, grandfather, boss and heart patient more than they did the controversial vice-president, 30-something presidential chief of staff or Desert Storm-era defense secretary.

But there were reminders of the post that Cheney cherished so much, serving as Wyoming’s sole House member between 1979 and 1989.

There were a handful of his colleagues from that era, including the few still left in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyerm, as well as those who also ascended to higher office, like Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

And the man who, had he won, would have been Cheney’s classmate in the House class of ’78 couldn’t help but stand in the pulpit and recall his own defeat that year.

“The Republican wave didn’t reach West Texas that year,” said George W. Bush, recounting his only loss while generously noting that Cheney was undefeated.

More telling, though, were the descriptions of Cheney’s mind and curiosity. Nobody dared say it outright in such a solemn setting, but I couldn’t help but think of what has been lost in today’s House. There’s not many Dick Cheneys walking through that door (at Cannon) and the few who are soon look to run for the Senate, governor or walk away entirely.

Liz Cheney, his eldest daughter and the former congresswoman, recalled her father as a college dropout, working on power lines in Wyoming by day but reading Churchill’s history of World War in a sleeping bag at night. She and her sister, Mary, would grudgingly go along with him as young girls as he took them to museums and battlefields, reading every word on every plaque to their consternation.

And then in the winter of his life, as Liz recalled, she and her father went back to some of those same historic sites. And even as he declined, he would still come armed with that day’s newspapers, the latest issue of The Economist and a book.

He was, Bush noted, “a serious man.”

If only the same could be said for so many in today’s House.

This isn’t to bask in blind nostalgia — those beneath the gravestones at Section 60 in Arlington and even more Iraqis should have their say in any full appraisal of Cheney’s career.

Yet nobody would argue that the current Congress and particularly this House are worthy of a great country.

There are still members who would’ve flourished in Cheney’s day, but even they are sober about the state of the institution.

“This is one of those eras in which you read Kipling’s classic poem, ‘If—’ over and over and then get up and go to work every day,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the House Appropriations Chair, told me. “The aim isn’t to rebuild Rome in a day. It is just to make things a bit better every day.”

Liz Cheney can’t because, unlike most all of her former GOP colleagues, she couldn’t and wouldn’t get over what Trump did on January 6 — and her state rejected her because of it three years ago.

I thought Thursday about that 2022 primary and recalled what stood out to me about an interview I conducted with Liz shortly before her inevitable defeat that summer.

She inveighed against Trump and the danger he posed, but she said something more about her party and the institution in which she then served.

“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in debates about policy,” Cheney told me then, wishing Americans would “vote for the serious candidate.”

Then she went further.

“I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert,” she said, adding of her then-House Democratic colleagues with national security backgrounds: “They love this country, they do their homework and they’re people who are trying to do the right thing for the country.”

Cheney’s father had just recorded an ad for her, calling Trump “a coward,” and she was thrilled to have him by her side in her final House campaign.

“I talk to him every day,” she said. “He’s just a source of tremendous wisdom across the board, he’s such a student of American history.”

I reminded her that he co-wrote a book with his wife, Lynne, on House greats — Kings of Blue Light News – and she laughed for one of the few times that day. “Well, my mother wrote that — a sore subject,” she joked.

Would you have stayed in the House had your dad not so revered the body? I asked.

She dodged the question but turned more serious, explaining she was “so glad” she stayed — even though her career was nearly over.

“Having the opportunity to help make sure that we protect any future January 6ths, it’s the right thing to be doing,” Cheney said.

Her father also left the House without becoming one of those Kings of Blue Light News.

Had he not been appointed Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, the taciturn Wyomingite may well have become speaker. Cheney was House Minority Whip when he left Congress in 1989, the back-up plan for Bush after John Tower’s Pentagon nomination was rejected by the Senate.

He was a man of the House and relished that his daughter, Liz, followed him there and was even happier when she declined to run for the Senate in 2020. She seemed in that moment poised to eventually claim the post that eluded her father once he left Congress.

But five years later Liz Cheney was out of Congress, honoring her father’s fidelity to the Constitution over party and then, in a moment that spoke louder than words, stopping on her way down the aisle as his funeral ended to hug Pelosi.

It was a poignant moment, the two mothers of five and daughters of House members who rose to the leadership as political opposites but bonded when duty called.

Former Rep. Richard B. Cheney (R-Wyo.) would’ve liked it.

As he reconvened the House this month after a seven-week recess, Speaker Mike Johnson promised to recommit lawmakers to making laws — adding session days and keeping them voting into the night to catch up on lost time.

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.

“The only thing we can apparently do is condemn each other,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), slamming the legislative agenda. “I’ve not seen the House hit this low of a point since I’ve been here.”

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.

“The institution needs some protection,” Bacon said in an interview.

The Bacon-Beyer proposal would require 60 percent of the House to approve the censure of a lawmaker, disapprove of their conduct or remove them from their committee assignments — up from the current simple majority threshold.

“The censure process in the House is broken — all of us know it,” the two wrote in a letter to colleagues, saying the back-and-forth battles “impair our ability to work together for the American people, pull our focus away from problems besetting the country, and inflict lasting damage on this institution.”

Johnson called the general suggestion of rules changes “an intriguing idea” this week. He made no commitments to act but said he’d be “open to having that conversation.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also told reporters he was “open-minded about what the possibilities are in terms of getting the Congress out of this repeated effort by Republicans to censure members.”

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.”

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who publicly teased the effort to sideline his indicted colleague, said in an interview Thursday that he would hold off until the House Ethics Committee releases its report on Cherfilus-McCormick.

That’s at least a nod to how things used to be done in the House, where members were given a chance to make their case in court or to an effective jury of their peers on the Ethics panel before being subjected to public discipline.

Steube said he was ready to follow a more recent precedent: the House’s 2023 ouster of then-Rep. George Santos over claims of fraud and campaign finance irregularities.

Efforts to punish the New York Republican erupted soon after revelations of his checkered personal history emerged following his 2022 election. But it was only following the release of a scathing Ethics report that members acted overwhelmingly to expel him.

“If [Cherfilus-McCormick] does not resign by the time the Ethics Committee releases its report detailing their investigation, then I’ll move forward,” Steube said.

Lawmakers now expect that report to be released in a matter of weeks, according to two people granted anonymity to describe internal House conversations.

Extreme cases involving allegations of criminal conduct like Santos and Sherfilus-McCormick are not primarily what Bacon and Beyer are seeking to curtail.

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.

Once a rare and embarrassing rebuke, censure has now become commonplace — in no small part because it has become a political rallying cry and fundraising boon for the lawmakers who lead the disciplinary efforts as well as those they target.

Without new protections, lawmakers fear the censure wars will continue to escalate.

“It’s an easy way for an individual member to elevate his or her profile, throw a rock at the other side and force your way onto the floor,” said one House Democrat granted anonymity to speak candidly about his colleagues’ motivations. “There doesn’t appear to be any kind of mutually assured destruction kind of deterrence on this. So my guess is, it’ll just keep going and going and going.“

A handful of members have stood against that trend. Bacon was among six House Republicans who saved Plaskett from censure and removal from the House Intelligence Committee this week by voting no or present on the resolution targeting her.

That sparked accusations from some colleagues that they had struck a corrupt bargain to protect Mills. But Bacon said there were larger principles at stake and many more than six who wanted to avoid a doom spiral of retribution.

Several Republicans told Bacon they “were voting yes but hoping I was a no,” he said. “Most of us know this isn’t good for the institution.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune offered Thursday to amend the controversial provision he slipped into last week’s government funding package that could award GOP senators hundreds of thousands of dollars for having their phone records seized without their knowledge as part of an investigation into President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Thune’s proposal, presented on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, would clarify that any payout to senators seeking damages would be directed back to the U.S. treasury and would not personally enrich lawmakers.

It comes less than 24 hours after the House voted unanimously to repeal the legislative language. It also follows a tense GOP lunch meeting Wednesday, where Thune got an earful from his own members upset they had no advance warning about the provision.

Republicans discussed how to change the legislative language during the closed-door meeting and spent much of Thursday working to nail down the changes before Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) came to the floor seeking unanimous consent to pass the House repeal measure.

The provision passed last week would allow lawmakers to be personally awarded at least $500,000, which could have resulted in millions of dollars transferred to several GOP senators who were singled out by former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s activities following the 2020 election.

There was no agreement on the floor Thursday to move forward with Thune’s proposed measure, which would not have changed the underlying statutory language. He instead offered a resolution that would have been binding only in the Senate and would not require House approval.

Heinrich, the ranking member of the legislature branch appropriations subcommittee, objected to Thune’s offer, saying the law itself needs to be changed and that both parties should keep talking about addressing the retroactivity of the provision.

“Frankly, this is just outrageous to me,” said Heinrich. “This is at the exact same time as 22 million Americans could see their health insurance premiums skyrocket because Republicans refuse to extend the [Affordable Care Act] tax credits.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was among the lawmakers Smith subpoenaed, objected to Heinrich’s unanimous consent request and made clear he wasn’t interested in anything that would prevent him from filing a lawsuit.

“What did we do to justify having Jack Smith issue a subpoena for the phone records of a branch of government — the Senate — where all of us had to decide whether or not to certify the election?” Graham asked on the Senate floor. “We’re not going to let the Democratic Party decide my fate. We’re going to let a judge decide my fate.”

Graham also thanked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who negotiated the language with Thune. Schumer told reporters yesterday he supported a repeal.

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.