Congress
The House is scrambling to avoid a censure death spiral
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.”
A top pollster for President Donald Trump is pushing back on recent public polling showing Republican Mike Rogers trailing progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the marquee Michigan Senate race.
Tony Fabrizio, who is conducting polling for Rogers, says the polls released this month are over-sampling Democratic-leaning voters, specifically college-educated and Black voters, according to an internal memo obtained by Blue Light News. A Susquehanna poll released this month showed El-Sayed leading by seven points and a TIPP poll showed him leading by four points.
El-Sayed’s lead in those polls is a “fake narrative,” Fabrizio wrote. His polling for AARP — conducted alongside Democratic firm Impact Research — showed the race essentially tied.
The warning follows huge polling misses in the Democratic primaries in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, which he wrote were “some of the most egregious examples of public polling failures in recent memory.” It’s also a sign that Republicans are wary of the string of bad polling numbers for Rogers in the race, which is crucial for determining control of the chamber.
Jim Lee, CEO of Susquehanna Polling and Research, told Blue Light News that the firm did not oversample any demographics. “I think their head is in the sand,” Lee said, noting in part what he said was a gap in enthusiasm between Democratic and Republican voters this cycle.
TIPP didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fabrizio, in the memo, argued on the Susquehanna poll: “50% of the sample in this survey is college-educated – making them massively overrepresented to what they should be. We took a look at 2022 and 2024 Exit Polls and VoteCast data and, as shown below, there is no indication that the Michigan electorate will be anywhere near 50% college-educated. In fact, it is unlikely they will be even 40% college-educated.”
He also noted “a huge gap” between college-educated and non-college educated voters.
“This was the driving issue of the public polling misses for President Trump in 2016 and 2024, especially in the Upper Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin,” Fabrizio added. “By increasing college-educated voters by 10+ points, and thus decreasing non-college educated voters by the same, we can pretty much guarantee this poll is significantly overestimating El-Sayed’s vote share.”
President Donald Trump and hemp industry lobbyists are hoping to win a final vote on Capitol Hill next week to skirt a ban on intoxicating products — with shutdown politics as leverage.
Nine months ago, Congress cleared a bill to close a loophole created in 2018 that allowed the sale of some hemp-derived products containing types of THC colloquially known as “diet weed.” That ban is supposed to take effect in mid-November, or roughly 11 weeks, to limit overall THC levels in hemp products that can get people high — including gummies, canned drinks, pills and vapes.
But Trump and industry leaders successfully lobbied Senate leaders to add language to a government funding patch earlier this month to delay the ban until mid-December, with the administration promising instead to finalize regulations cracking down on how the products are made and sold.
Now House Republican leaders are aiming to clear that bill for Trump’s signature early next week, according to three people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. And many GOP lawmakers are not pleased at the prospect of being rolled.
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) told reporters last week that he expected House lawmakers would “iron out” some “sticking points” with the Senate-passed funding bill, “particularly the hemp issue,” rather than pass the legislation without changes — which appears to be GOP leadership’s current plan.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) was more blunt: “it is morally reprehensible to threaten a shutdown over a loophole Congress agreed to close to less than a year ago,” he said in a statement Thursday.
Yet despite fierce pushback from lawmakers warning that the intoxicating products are harming Americans, hemp industry leaders are preparing for a victory, betting members of Congress ultimately care more about swiftly passing legislation to avert a Sept. 30 government shutdown before the midterms.
“Any effort to try to shut down the government — over a one-month delay on a hemp issue — I don’t think is going to fly well with most members of Congress,” Jonathan Miller, a top lawyer for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable advocacy group, said in an interview this week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its plans for imposing new rules on hemp products in the coming months. But the Trump administration is expected to need more time than mid-December to finalize regulations, so hemp industry representatives are discussing a “regulatory bridge” that would impose temporary rules while continuing to avoid a full ban, according to Miller.
That could include restricting purchase to adults age 21 and older, blocking imports from China, mandating certain manufacturing practices, cracking down on copycat products that look like popular candy or potato chips and requiring transparency in product labeling.
While lawmakers have been back home over their summer break, hemp industry leaders have fanned out across the country to make their case for this plan. “The hemp industry does not have an August recess,” Christopher Lackner, head of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, said in an interview this month of the group’s work to facilitate passage of the Senate-passed funding bill.
Trump administration officials have also been telling reluctant lawmakers they will use the one-month delay to work on regulations. “The White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in an interview this month.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who fought in the Senate to retain the ban as originally intended, said White House officials have said “they don’t want another extension, and I agree with that.”
In a statement, Ricketts said that “manufactured high-THC products like gummies and drinks are putting our kids in the hospital” and need to be taken “off our shelves.”
Some supporters of the ban say the White House and industry are just employing delay tactics to get to December, when lawmakers will face another pressure campaign to delay the ban while they are motivated to avert a shutdown before leaving town for the holidays.
“What they’re really after is to try to jam this on some must-pass, end-of-the-year funding,” Budd told reporters earlier this month. “That’s really what this is about.”
Budd fought to block the delay in the Senate as part of the government funding measure, but his amendment to that end was shot down 61-32 before the chamberpassed the legislation, sending it on for House action.
Trump personally called Budd after the senator filed the amendment and talked about creating federal regulations for hemp products, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion.
Days later, Budd demanded a vote on the amendment anyway and continues to slam the hemp industry.
“It is clear that businesses that sell unregulated, intoxicating products will stop at nothing to protect their bottom line, even at the expense of children’s health and safety,” he said in a statement this week.
Besides lawmakers fighting to ban intoxicating hemp products, others are pushing alongside the White House and industry for federal regulations.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-W.Va.) has crafted legislation that would direct the Food and Drug Administration to create federal rules for intoxicating hemp products and wants to see mandates for third-party testing, as well as new THC limits per serving.
Griffith told reporters Thursday the “deadline push” in the Senate-passed government funding measure “is not long enough” to finalize necessary regulations.
Since state limits for THC vary widely throughout the country and the federal government has taken years to step in since the hemp loophole was created in 2018, Griffith argued it makes more sense to regulate the intoxicating products than to enact a federal ban.
“That horse is out of the barn,” he said. “What we need to do is corral it.”
Kelsey Brugger, Amanda Friedman and Rachel Shin contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump’s $400-million super PAC is taking its first steps into the general election: hosting a public event in battleground Michigan, headlined by Vice President JD Vance.
Battleground Republicans have been clamoring for Trump’s MAGA Inc. to spend in competitive races. The Michigan event is an early indicator of how the massive group might seek to use its funds to help the party keep control of Washington.
Vance will be joined in Sterling, Michigan, on Monday by GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers, 10th District nominee Mike Bouchard Jr. and gubernatorial nominee John James, along with several other Michigan Republicans, according to an event advisory from MAGA Inc.
The GOP sees Michigan’s open seat as its best Senate pickup target this fall as Rogers faces former public health leader and progressive Abdul El-Sayed, who emerged from a grueling primary earlier this month.
“MAGA Inc. will be hosting events throughout the nation to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress in order to finish cleaning up the mess the Biden-Harris-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats left,” said Alex Pfeiffer, spokesperson for MAGA Inc. “We’re not going back to their record inflation, open borders, and surging crime.”
MAGA Inc. is sitting on more funds than any other super PAC, and Republican donors and battleground candidates have been hoping it will unleash that money to help the party keep control of the House and Senate.
So far, the group has only spent only a few million dollars out of its massive fundraising haul, and its funds have largely gone to competitive Republican primaries. Most recently, it spent $827,000 on phone calls and text messages to boost Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the state’s special primary.
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