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.”