Republicans and Democrats in Congress spent much of last week voting to formally reprimand each other, and both sides are tired of the back-and-forth.
Congress voted on as many censure measures last week as it did during all of the 118th Congress. On Monday, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) lobbed a disapproval measure against retiring Democratic colleague Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois. The next day, Rep. Ralph Norman, who is running for governor in the state of South Carolina, made a motion to censure Del. Stacey Plaskett and remove her from her committees after The Washington Post reported she was texting with convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 hearing. That measure failed.
By the week’s end, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), who is also running for governor, had made an unsuccessful attempt to censure Rep. Cory Mills (R-Florida) for a range of offenses including questions about whether his business sought and received federal contracts during his time as a congressman. The House ended up referring the censure motion to the Ethics Committee.
Now a bipartisan group of members is trying to address the growing frustration. Reps. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) and Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) are teaming up on legislation that would raise the threshold from a simple majority to a 60-percent majority to punish a House member with censure, disapproval or removal of committees. The resolution had 31 co-sponsors, including six Republicans and 24 Democrats, as of Monday evening.
Beyer, who has served in the House since 2015, lamented “the tension, the anger, the refusal to work together,” but he said that growing frustration in the chamber made him optimistic a change in the rules could get a vote as soon as next year.
Some members also voiced frustration that recent censure efforts have circumvented the House Ethics Committee, the traditional venue for member discipline.
“Censures mean nothing here,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), who voted against censuring Plaskett, told The Washington Post. “Removing from committees does and should only be done after Ethics does its work, and I’m not participating in committee removal outside of the Ethics Committee process ever again.”
Censure efforts that bypass the House Ethics Committee have frustrated some members who have previously served on the panel. Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohi0), who called the recent run of censures “ridiculous,” said members should refer colleagues they suspect of misconduct to the Ethics panel and allow time to investigate rather than spending legislative hours reprimanding one another. “We have the important business in this country to do, and we’re not doing it because we’re wasting time on events like this,” said Joyce, a former House Ethics Committee member.
But Ethics Committee referrals come with their own problems. Former representative Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania), who chaired the committee from 2023 until 2025, said the panel is understaffed and often times accedes to requests from the Justice Department to hold off on certain investigations. Those problems add to the frustrations of some members who question the commmitee’s effectiveness.
The recent onslaught of disciplinary actions has diminished their effect, said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who was removed from the Foreign Affairs Committee last Congress. Republicans unsuccessfullyattempted to censure Omar earlier this year for comments accusing conservatives of using Charlie Kirk’s death to advance their political goals and suggesting that Kirk did not support “civil debate.”
“It puts us in a really bad shape when it becomes a tool to fundraise and to get your name out there, then it loses the seriousness of why the censure was created. And I believe that we are seeing members who are struggling to gain attention or want attention, utilizing it,” she said.
Even members who have introduced censures said the procedure is overused. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana), who unsuccessfully tried to censure Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-New Jersey) after she was indicted for an incident at an ICE facility, said the House has gotten “carried away” with censures. He defended his censure against McIver, however, saying that she, per the House rules, should have voluntarily stepped down from her committees after being indicted. “We have rules and guidelines that have been long-standing, and historically, they’ve been recognized and respected by members.”
Higgins dodged his own censure last year after he made comments demeaning Haitians on social media as “thugs” who eat pets. He walked back his comments, and the censure motion against him — pushed by the Congressional Black Caucus — never got a vote.
Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Georgia) defended censuring members who subvert “what Congress is trying to do.” McCormick led a successful censure against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) in 2023 for her comments following the Oct. 7 attack in Israel. Twenty-two Democrats joined all but four Republicans on the vote. McCormick said a censure was an appropriate reprimand for Tlaib because it was the House conducting “oversight” over one of its own members for making statements that go “against the United States’ interest.” (Tlaib defended her comments as free speech in defense of Palestinian civilians).
Still, he said, the House should let the Ethics Committee or the justice system handle investigations involving alleged criminal conduct. He voted to refer the censure motion against Mills to the House Ethics Committee.
As recently as a few years ago, censure was never an option members seriously considered, even to punish members accused of sexual abuse during the Me Too era, Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia), who served in the House from 2015-2019, recalled in an interview. Instead, she said, members were expected to resign when faced with serious allegations. Comstock, who has become a vocal critic of President Donald Trump since leaving office, said the president’s ability to weather accusations of sexual misconduct and his pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters have encouraged members to try to stay in office in the face of damning allegations of their own.
“Back in the day, these type of actions weren’t taken because there still was some sense of shame and decency by the members themselves,” Comstock said. “They’d step down because they realized it caused a lot of turmoil within their own caucus.”
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