Even by the standards of the raucous House of Representatives, the past week was an exceptionally caustic one, with lawmakers from both parties lobbing or threatening no fewer than a half-dozen censures and official scoldings at one another.
The purported offenses ran the gamut. One Democrat plotted to handpick his successor, while another texted with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. A Republican was accused by his colleagues of contracting abuses, faking his military honors and assaulting a woman at his apartment. A third Democrat was indicted on charges that she stole Federal Emergency Management Agency funds.
It was a vivid illustration of how official House rebukes, once exceedingly rare and mostly a matter of consensus for the most egregious conduct or illegal acts by a sitting member of Congress, have become commonplace in recent years.
Members of both parties have stepped up the use of censure resolutions as a partisan political weapon. Many of them include accusations by lawmakers that in the past would first have been investigated by the House Ethics Committee — and often weighed in court — before reaching the floor if found to be valid.
Instead, these days, lawmakers are running to the House floor right away with accusations and innuendos, leading to a proliferation of calls for official scoldings, which is a bit like a gossipy group chat spilling into the Congressional Record.
The censure arms race has generated so much bad blood among members — and consumed so much time — that some in both parties are calling for bipartisan steps to de-escalate. Others are crying foul at what they claim are backroom deals being made between the top leaders of both parties to quietly kill the measures, though leaders on both sides deny that is happening.
“We’re wasting each other’s time here,” said Representative David Joyce of Ohio, one of a few Republicans who voted against censuring a Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday. “We’ve got important business to do on behalf of our country, and to waste it on these high school fights is just ridiculous.”
Here’s a look at what’s going on.
What’s a censure?
A censure resolution is a disciplinary measure brought to the House floor to condemn a lawmaker for unlawful or unethical acts. It signals disapproval by a majority of the body of a lawmaker’s actions, but stops short of expelling them from the House.
Once censured, a member must stand in the well of the House as the resolution, which includes a recitation of their misdeeds, is read aloud as a public rebuke. Members can also be removed from their committee assignments as part of a censure, as in the case of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, in 2021, and Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, in 2023.
A lesser form of reprimand is a resolution of disapproval. The House passed one on Tuesday, rebuking Representative Jesús García, Democrat of Illinois, for hand-selecting his successor.
That scolding was a rare instance in which a lawmaker — in that case Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington — initiated the rebuke of a member of her own party. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were so livid that they weighed censuring her in retaliation, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions, though no such measure has been introduced.
Five members of the House have been censured since 2021, and several more have faced censure attempts that failed. Before that, the last censure was back in 2010, against Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, a Democrat who had been found guilty of several ethics violations and the first member of either party in nearly three decades to face a censure.
Why are there so many censures now?
Censures are unique in that they are privileged, meaning they have a special status that requires them to be brought to the House floor quickly, without being blessed by leadership or going through a committee.
That means there is little barrier for introducing and demanding a vote on one. It has become common practice for Democrats to retaliate against Republicans for trying to censure their members, and vice versa.
Republicans on Tuesday moved to censure Delegate Stacey Plaskett, Democrat of the Virgin Islands, and remove her from the Intelligence Committee for exchanging text messages with Mr. Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing.
Representative Yvette Clarke, Democrat of New York, then introduced a censure resolution against Representative Cory Mills, Republican of Florida, for having “on several occasions conducted himself in a manner that reflects discredit upon the House of Representatives.” Among other things, it cited news reports about the police being called to Mr. Mills’s apartment this year to investigate what was later classified as a domestic violence incident involving a woman who was not his wife, campaign finance misdeeds and accusations that he had falsified the events that led to his being awarded the Bronze Star.
The Plaskett censure effort failed on Wednesday, when a half-dozen Republicans crossed party lines and helped Democrats defeat it. Ms. Clarke never did insist on a vote on her censure proposal against Mr. Mills.
Some Republicans, including Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, cried foul, asserting that the two congressional leaders had cut a secret deal to sink both measures.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s office denied that there had been any such agreement. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, sidestepped questions about whether there had been a deal, saying only that Democrats would not “unilaterally disarm.”
Enraged, Ms. Mace filed her own censure resolution against Mr. Mills, accusing him of stolen valor, financial misconduct and dating violence.
That attempt failed on Wednesday, when lawmakers voted instead to refer the allegations to the Ethics Committee, which hours before announced it had opened an investigation into his conduct.
Are censures losing their meaning?
Both Republicans and Democrats have argued in recent days that the censure was being abused.
“It has become a political tactic, rather than an action to protect the reputation of the House,” said Representative Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, who in past years served as the majority and minority leader. “If it becomes common, it will lose its prophylactic effect.”
On Friday, a bipartisan pair in the House introduced a bill to raise the vote threshold to censure a member, disapprove of their conduct or remove them from committees from a simple majority to 60 percent of members present and voting.
“We believe this is a sensible reform that would fix a broken process and raise the level of sanity in the House,” Representatives Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, and Donald S. Beyer Jr., Democrat of Virginia, wrote in a letter to their colleagues on Thursday.
The need to make changes to the censure process drew some backing from Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of Virginia and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, who stopped short of endorsing the proposal to raise the vote threshold but said there were “a lot of concerns on both sides of the aisle” about the recent surge in censures. A top Democrat on the panel, Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, said there was “broad support” to overhaul the process.
Congressional ethics experts caution that one byproduct of the censure fever is likely to be a further lowering of the public opinion of Congress.
“When you have these attempts to censure someone based on anything less than solid facts and legal analysis of what is the violation, you do have damage done to public trust and public understanding of what’s really going on,” said Kedric Payne, who was previously deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics.
Representative Andrew Garbarino, Republican of New York and a member of the Ethics Committee, said it would be far better if that panel could investigate allegations before they were sped to the House floor for a vote.
“Right now, it seems it’s a race to get them done so somebody can get on the news,” he said.
Are more censures coming?
For now, the appetite among members of Congress to punish one another appears insatiable. On Wednesday, within hours after federal prosecutors charged Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Democrat of Florida, with stealing federal disaster funds and funneling them into her congressional campaign, a Republican said he would introduce a censure.
But that did not last long. Representative Greg Steube, also of Florida, soon announced that he would seek a graver penalty, even before Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick has faced trial.
“On second thought,” Mr. Steube wrote in a post on social media. “I have decided to skip censure and move straight to expulsion.”
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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