After a week of censures, some in Congress are having second thoughts

The Washington Post ^ | 11/25/2025 5:00 am EST | Kadia Goba and Matthew Choi

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Censures were historically rare rebukes against lawmakers. But members of the House are increasingly using them in ways their peers say are political.

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.

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TOPICS: Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: censures; congress; endstagerepublic

[zeebee]

Have at it. Keep ‘em honest.

[faithhopecharity]

foxes guarding chicken coops -— not a Success Strategy

[FrankRizzo890]

If I had to guess, I’d say the R’s are mad because they’re having to vote. They’re used to winning control and then doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING until they lose control. And then they cry for donations to allow them to regain control.

[BenLurkin]

‘If parties in a republic are necessary to secure a degree of vigilance sufficient to keep the public functionaries within the bounds of law and duty, at that point their usefulness ends. Beyond that they become destructive of public virtue, the parent of a spirit antagonist to that of liberty, and eventually its inevitable conqueror.

‘We have examples of republics where the love of country and of liberty at one time were the dominant passions of the whole mass of citizens, and yet, with the continuance of the name and forms of free government, not a vestige of these qualities remaining in the bosoms of any one of its citizens.

‘It was the beautiful remark of a distinguished English writer that “in the Roman senate Octavius had a party and Anthony a party, but the Commonwealth had none.”

‘Yet the senate continued to meet in the temple of liberty to talk of the sacredness and beauty of the Commonwealth and gaze at the statues of the elder Brutus and of the Curtii and Decii, and the people assembled in the forum, not, as in the days of Camillus and the Scipios, to cast their free votes for annual magistrates or pass upon the acts of the senate, but to receive from the hands of the leaders of the respective parties their share of the spoils and to shout for one or the other, as those collected in Gaul or Egypt and the lesser Asia would furnish the larger dividend.

‘The spirit of liberty had fled, and, avoiding the abodes of civilized man, had sought protection in the wilds of Scythia or Scandinavia; and so under the operation of the same causes and influences it will fly from our Capitol and our forums. A calamity so awful, not only to our country, but to the world, must be deprecated by every patriot and every tendency to a state of things likely to produce it immediately checked.

‘The entire remedy is with the people.’

William Henry Harrison

[Iron Munro]

"...both sides are tired of the back-and-forth.

Both sides agree that the bickering is wasting valuable time that they should be using to do insider trading, skimming money
from big spending bills, making deals for kickbacks and molesting underage pageboys and girls in the cloakroom.

[thesligoduffyflynns]

NO NO NO NO!!! its not!

If you are in the arena snd not doing your job a option is censure

[for-q-clinton]

Censure doesn’t do anything. So why even do it?

[Ex-Con777]

Pelosi never needed a censure vote to impose her will. She blocked certain gop house members from various committees. She even blocked MTG from serving on any committee.

Mike Johnson should follow her lead.

EC