Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), who is Jewish, violently pounded the lectern: “Never again, dammit, means never again!”
Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) alleged that Tlaib “believes Israel should be eradicated.”
“It is a lie!” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) called out, and she and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) continued heckling.
Bush, in her own remarks, ignored the gavel and, yelling between gasps for breath, said the censure is “not surprising because this place is where 1,700 members of Congress, this elected body, enslaved black people!”
From the back of the chamber, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) shouted: “Show some respect for this place!”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) bellowed at the Republicans that “maybe because of your lack of diversity you lack the cognitive and emotional ability to recognize diverse opinions when they speak truth to power!”
“Pull a fire alarm!” taunted Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.), referring to Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea for triggering an alarm during a key vote in September.
Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.), who introduced the censure resolution, acknowledged that there had been “a lot of screaming, a lot of accusations, you could say, on both sides.” He assured the chamber that “I don’t really care what race, religion, gender or orientation you are.”
“Yes, you do!” Bush heckled.
The House is not in order. Under Johnson, the House is utterly out of control.
It’s not just the speaker’s inability to curb the proliferation of censure resolutions, which have turned the chamber into a seething den of recriminations. In just seven days, the federal government will shut down after a temporary extension in funding (which cost Kevin McCarthy the speakership) expires. And Johnson (R-La.) has been fumbling in the dark.
He squandered the week without taking action on a plan to avoid a shutdown. His plan — finally announced late Saturday afternoon — will come to the floor just days before the lights go out. It was the convoluted, “laddered” type of temporary funding patch that Democrats had already panned, and it immediately generated complaints from right wingers, who called it a “bad bill” and “beyond crazy.”
“I’m not going to tell you when we’ll bring it to the floor, but it will be in time,” Johnson said during a news conference this week. “How about that? Trust us. We’re working through the process in a way that I think the people will be proud of.”
“Trust us” would not seem to be a compelling argument, given the early record of the Johnson speakership.
The House wasted hours on Tuesday debating and voting on amendments to the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill, only to pull it from the floor before the final vote because of a revolt by Republicans from the Northeast over more than $1 billion in cuts to Amtrak.
The House then wasted hours on Wednesday debating and voting on amendments to the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill, only to pull it moments before the scheduled vote on Thursday morning. This time, moderate Republicans rebelled over a provision in the bill that would allow employers in D.C. to discriminate against women who have an abortion or use contraception.
Republicans were back in the same ungovernable state they had been in before Johnson’s ascension. “I don’t think the Lord Jesus himself could manage this group,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) told NBC News.
Soon after the Republicans’ second spending bill collapsed, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went to the floor to unveil a resolution calling for the immediate impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The House must now take that up next week amid the scramble to avoid a shutdown.
In the fortnight he has been speaker, Johnson managed to take the one issue that commands overwhelming bipartisan support — sending military aid to Israel — and put it in jeopardy by attaching it to a partisan attack on the IRS. Aid to Ukraine, which also commands broad support, is similarly bottled up.
“I refuse to put people over politics,” the new speaker wrote in a fundraising email to supporters last week. Was this a typo? Or a statement of policy?
As Republicans held a closed-door caucus meeting in the House basement this week to discuss their plans for avoiding a shutdown, an aide to Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) held a poster featuring three images of Gru from “Despicable Me” (the greatest criminal mind of the century!) and the message “Collins for Conference Vice Chair.”
Was he proposing that House Republicans steal the moon with their SR-6 Shrink Ray? It was as well-formed a plan as anything else they’ve produced. As part of his campaign for the junior leadership post (the position Johnson held before his elevation), Collins also released a video that seemed to troll his fellow Republicans. It showed, among other things: Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) showing off his military-grade handguns and high-capacity magazines during a House Judiciary Committee hearing; Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) inquiring about “nonhuman spacecraft” at another hearing; Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) asking a hearing witness, “Do you believe that we should place a ban on spoons?”; and Fallon, at still another hearing saying “I’m going to get on my unicorn and ride it to a pool to visit my mermaid that was financed by a leprechaun.”
“This is my team,” Collins wrote in an accompanying message. He lost.
Outside the caucus meeting where House Republicans were debating their various options for avoiding a shutdown, lawmakers coming and going had no idea what plan their leaders would settle upon. They offered endless variations of evasions to reporters in the hallway: “Uh, we’ll find out. … Working on it. … We’re looking at all the options. … What?” Johnson, for his part, called the aimless session “a refreshing, constructive family conversation.”
Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) told Politico that the plan was as “clear as mud.” Others used the phrases “train wreck,” “all over the place, like usual” and “I don’t have an opinion on it because I don’t understand it.” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.) assured the outlet that “we’ve got a plan” to avert a shutdown — “but I can’t tell you until it’s a real plan.” Ssshhh!
Still in the dark was Maine’s Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. She told NBC News’s Frank Thorp on Wednesday that “I’m getting anxious.” Why? “Because we don’t have a plan.”
The absence of a plan was the one commonality running through the various activities of the House this week. Two major pieces of legislation went down in flames. House Republicans couldn’t even get two other spending bills out of committee because of partisan provisions and poison pills. Among the various riders: provisions dropping the pay of Mayorkas, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to $1 apiece. There were attempts to cut the salary of the White House press secretary and the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman to $1, and to defund the office of Vice President Harris.
The serial failures are the direct result of GOP leadership’s stubborn insistence on passing spending bills with Republican votes alone — in contrast to the Senate, where all 12 appropriations bills command bipartisan support.
Also in the no-plan category: the House Republicans’ effort to impeach President Biden. This week, they finally got their chance to grill the prosecutor overseeing the Hunter Biden case, David Weiss. But instead of holding a public hearing, as the Justice Department offered, they opted for a private deposition. Apparently, they feared another embarrassing spectacle in which they failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. The fear turned out to be justified: Weiss, a Trump appointee, told the lawmakers that he had full decision-making authority in the case and didn’t experience any interference.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) acknowledged that the Republican inquisitors got “almost nothing” from the highly anticipated session.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) was undeterred by the latest failure to find evidence. Immediately after the Weiss deposition, he issued subpoenas to Hunter Biden and to James Biden, the president’s brother.
Comer is getting testy about his empty net. Asked by HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney whether he’d had any luck finding Joe Biden’s supposed Ukrainian bribe in the bank records he subpoenaed, the chairman shot back: “I could pull gold bars out of his refrigerator, you would write bad stuff. You would blame it on Trump.”
Now, now, Mr. Chairman. No one is asking for gold bars. But can’t you come up with anything other than dross?
It would be unfair to dismiss the Johnson speakership as entirely unsuccessful so far. After all, he has presided over a golden age of censure. To recap:
Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.
Greene filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.
Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) filed a resolution to censure Bowman.
Greene filed another resolution to censure Tlaib.
Miller filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.
McCormick filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.
In retaliation, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) filed a resolution to censure Greene, and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif) filed a resolution to censure Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.).
The only one to pass so far is McCormick’s censure of Tlaib — which was a source of intense jealousy for Greene. She produced a 13-minute video rant excoriating Republican leaders for favoring McCormick’s censure over her “very harsh” alternative. “We have a terrorist, Rashida Tlaib, serving as a member of Congress,” Greene alleged, mentioning “Terrorist Tlaib” twice more.
In reality, Tlaib’s main offense had been to promote the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which she implausibly denied is meant, as it is widely understood, as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), though leading the debate against censuring Tlaib, told the House “the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ is abhorrent to me, even with her published explanation of what she means by it.”
Tlaib richly deserves reproach. Her river-to-the-sea belief leaves only two possibilities for millions of Jews in Israel: exile or death. She defended herself on the floor by saying, disingenuously, that “the idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic … is being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.” But her own words, as I have noted, have gone beyond criticism of the Israeli government into alleging shadowy conspiracy theories involving Jews globally.
The larger question isn’t whether Tlaib deserves condemnation, but who doesn’t. “If we are going to start censuring anybody who says something we don’t like, all we will do from now on is censure each other all day,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) pointed out during the debate. “My Republican colleagues go on and on about cancel culture and here they are today trying to cancel someone.”
Will they next be censuring Mast for comparing Palestinian civilians to Nazis this week? (I later listened to him defend his “pretty damn good comparison.”) Or Miller for talking about bombing Gaza into a parking lot? Or Johnson himself for supporting sodomy laws?
There have been only 26 censures on the House floor in U.S. history. At the current pace of the Johnson speakership, we could have that many in a year.
Maybe Johnson will step in and tell his censorious colleagues to cease their censures. Or maybe he will continue to refuse to put people over politics.
Trust him? Not after this start.
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