Censure and how the House of Representatives polices itself

Corruption like bribery isn't the only reason the House Committee on Ethics acts. More and more, representatives are being formally punished for what they say, even if it's true.

If you’ve watched Law & Order, you know the stories are each divided between the police investigation and the district attorney’s prosecution. Well, for legislators in the House of Representatives, it’s more the police on one hand and the House Committee on Ethics (HCE) on the other. Dun dun.

A bipartisan committee, but politics in practice

Law enforcement, both local and federal, investigate alleged violations of the law. The HCE investigates violations of House Rules. Some things are violations of both laws and House Rules so a representative might get investigated both by law enforcement and HCE. For example, Rep. Cuellar was indicted by federal prosecutors in 2024 for allegedly accepting bribes. The HCE also opened an investigation. Last year he was pardoned by President Trump. So is he free of all concerns now? Probably, but not necessarily. While the legal case is over, the HCE can still investigate the allegations of bribery and censure, and even recommend to expel him, because bribery is also against House Rules.

How did this dual structure come to be?

Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution says

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

Only expulsion has any detail to it and that’s that it requires a 2/3rd majority. Otherwise, the House has a range of punishments that have evolved over time to include censure - where not only does a majority vote to agree to a resolution of censure, but the censured member has to come down into the well of the House Floor while the resolution is read - but also reprimand/disapproval in which a majority of the House votes to agree to a resolution of reprimand/disapproval (but the member isn’t called down front to be shamed) and then a range of lesser public indications of “this was bad behavior”.

Until a standing committee to handle ethical or criminal allegations was created in the 1960s, reviews of and votes on censures or reprimands were handled by the whole House. With the establishment of the House Committee on Ethics (HCE), concerns were moved to the small group to investigate and then recommend action to the House as a whole. The HCE has an equal number of members from both the majority and minority parties in the House with the chair coming from the majority party. Most actions require a majority vote, or in other words, require members from both parties to vote in favor of them. In theory, this keeps the HCE from being purely a vehicle for political punishment. Again, in theory.

In 2008, the Office of Congressional Conduct (OCC, originally the Office of Congressional Ethics) was established as an independent and non-partisan office, staffed by career civil servants rather than elected politicians, to handle allegations of misconduct and then make recommendations to the HCE on how or whether to proceed.

Why was the OCC created? Because of the pervasive belief that investigations of legislators were based solely on political goals despite its attempt to avoid this problem in its design. In theory then, an allegation would come to the OCC, they’d investigate to see if there was anything to it and, if so, recommend that HCE use their work to decide how to proceed.

There’s just one problem: all ethics investigations are political because Congress is an inherently political body.

There’s never a case when choosing to investigate a specific legislator’s actions, where the member is in either the majority or minority, won’t have political ramifications. So, when a legislator under investigation complains that they’re being attacked for politics, they’re not wrong, but it’s also not necessarily exculpatory because they may have indeed also broken laws or violated House rules.

Take the recent example of former Rep. George Santos. As soon as he won his election, stories began to appear in the press indicating that he had lied outrageously about a wide range of things in order to get elected. It soon became clear there was evidence that he had also committed a number of criminal campaign finance violations. As a result, there was a lot of pressure within the House to expel him. But, at that time, the Republicans held a very narrow majority in Congress. So as much as he could creditably be said to bring disrepute on the House just by being there and there were vocal objections to his presence from members of his own party, there was a political problem for the Republicans because they needed every vote they could get. Do they let the criminal process play out and keep him as a voting member? Or do they acknowledge his many violations of House rules in addition to criminal codes and take the high road? After nearly a year in Congress, the House chose to expel Santos. He was subsequently tried, convicted, served a few months in prison and then released when President Trump commuted his sentence. This was an unusually obvious case of unethical behavior and even so, political considerations were never not part of the equation.

Censures for speech

Over the course of the last few years though, there’s been a new trend in censures that is all politics. Legislators are not accused of violating anything other than the rule that requires them to bring credit to the House. However, the definition of discrediting the House has been filtered through partisan lenses.

The first instance of this new use of censure came in 2023. Former Rep. Schiff (now a California Senator) was censured by the House of Representatives 213-209 on June 21, 2023 for various statements and misstatements he made between 2017-2019 related to President Trump and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — all likely protected from criminal prosecution by the First Amendment, but not protected from a House censure. The censure resolution itself contained misstatements including denying that the 2016 Trump Campaign attempted to coordinate with Russia, which was well documented by the Mueller Report. There was no campaign finance issue, no sexual harassment, no financial crime or other corruption alleged. He was censured because the Republican majority was angry about things he had said.

Perhaps the real first instance of this was when the House voted to remove (now-former) Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene from her committees in 2021. It wasn’t a censure, but it was an effort to punish her for being a conspiracy theorist whose antics were, say it with me, bringing discredit to the House. 11 Republicans voted with all Democrats on that vote which was an unusual outcome.

Since then these censures over speech have passed the House:

• In Nov. 2023, Rep. Tlaib was censured 234-188 for, according to the censure resolution, promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Tlaib and a number of Democratic colleagues denied that anything she said amounted to the allegations.

• At the President’s Joint Address to Congress on March 4 2025, Rep. Green repeatedly objected to various statements by President Trump. He was removed from the chamber and on March 6, he was censured 224-198.

Meanwhile, in the last few months there have been attempts to censure Rep. McIver for having been charged with impeding law enforcement in a complicated situation at an ICE facility in New Jersey and Del. Plaskett for texting with Jeffrey Epstein during a Congressional hearing. In both cases, just enough Republicans voted with Democrats to table the censure resolutions that they failed.

Did McIver and Plaskett deserve the censures? For the most part, your answer will depend on which party you identify with - that’s certainly the case with House membership. Did McIver’s scuffle with ICE agents bring disrepute on the House? Not if you think that she was right in her efforts to defend Newark’s mayor Ras Baraka from what the Department of Justice later admitted was a wrongful arrest. Does Plaskett texting with Epstein bring disrepute on the House? Apparently not in the minds of most Democratic members.

Campaign finance violations, misusing his office and sexual assault and stalking: The cases of Rep. Cory Mills

Also in both cases, Democrats used the threat of a censure over allegations against Republican Rep. Cory Mills to successfully kill the resolutions against Democrats McIver and Plaskett. Was the threat against Mills what pushed those Republicans to vote to table? They didn’t say so, but it might have been.

Something that is frustrating for regular observers of Congress is that the allegations against Mills are much more serious than any brought against either McIver or Plaskett. He is variously accused of multiple campaign finance violations, misusing his office and sexual assault and stalking. Yet, these allegations were treated purely as political tools. He should have already been under investigation by the Ethics Committee for all of them (he had been investigation for a small fraction for about a year already). Instead, Democrats appeared to only take the allegations as seriously as they needed to protect their own members.

Ironically, as the last vote in a 3 censure/censure-like vote week, a censure resolution against Mills, brought by fellow Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, was diverted into a recommendation that HCE investigate Mills on all the listed allegations. They say they have begun that process.

Serve or resign

Except for George Santos, and Greene who resigned for unrelated reasons, everyone mentioned so far in this post is still serving either in the House or in the Senate. Most still have their committee memberships and have faced no further consequences.

The truth is, no matter what a legislator says about Congress, they generally want to be there and will work to stay in Congress. Likely the one true punishment for a legislator is being either expelled or voted out in the next election. If you look through our Misconduct Database, you can find lots of examples where legislators were being investigated and, while there was no specific action taken by the Ethics Committee or law enforcement against them, they also chose not to run again or lost in primaries. Recent examples include: Rep. Michael McCaul, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Rep. Kaialiʻi Kahele and Rep. Carolyn Maloney. There were doubtless other factors that contributed to each of these legislators’ retirements/losses including redistricting, but it’s also possible (and certain in Cawthorn’s case) that the party ceased to provide support as did the public.

To recap, when a legislator’s behavior warrants punishment, the House has a number of mechanisms by which to do so. Traditionally, these efforts are reserved for violations of House Rules other than just bringing discredit to the House or for their speech. But, as Congress continues to be intensely partisan and very, very narrowly divided, that is changing and censures as purely political tools seem to be gaining ground.

Misconduct should have consequences

There is a nascent effort by a bipartisan set of representatives to change the House Rules so that a censure requires a 60% vote rather than the current simple majority. This effort misses the point. No one else can punish House members for violations of House Rules besides the House itself. The problem isn’t the number of censures; it’s that the censures aren’t necessarily about actual misconduct. Making it easier for House members to violate House Rules looks like a step backwards. The rules aren’t the problem. The problem is that there’s so much political value to pursuing censures even when there’s no specific misconduct alleged.

As it is, HCE investigations can drag on for years. Rep. Mills, as we already noted, has been under investigation for a year already. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick’s HCE investigation began in 2023 and is not yet concluded. Same for Rep. Troy Nehls. Meanwhile investigations of Rep. Henry Cuellar and Rep. Andy Ogles began in 2024 and remain unresolved.

The House would be much better served by beefing up HCE and OCC and by pressuring legislators to cooperate with investigations rather than stonewalling them, and not making it harder to discipline members.