The Republican-led effort to censure Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., over his claims about former President Donald Trump’s connections to Russia succeeded Wednesday.
House lawmakers voted 213-209 along party lines to censure Schiff, with six lawmakers voting present. Immediately after the vote, Democrats in the lower chamber began chanting “shame.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., renewed her effort to censure Schiff for alleging collusion between Trump and Russia during the former president’s 2016 campaign, after her initial attempt was blocked last week as House Democrats – along with 20 Republicans – moved to table the resolution, effectively killing it. The House voted 225-196 to table the legislation at the time.
However, the House cleared the procedural hurdle on Wednesday before voting for/rejecting the push to censure Schiff.
After the failed effort, Luna tweeted she would remove the portion of her resolution that suggested fining Schiff $16 million if a House Ethics Committee investigation determined he “lied, made misrepresentations and abused sensitive information,” a provision that prompted some House Republicans to join Democrats in killing the measure.
“The Constitution says the House may make its own rules but we can’t violate other (later) provisions of the Constitution,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, tweeted before the first vote. “A $16 million fine is a violation of the 27th and 8th amendments.”
Luna suggested she had the votes to censure Schiff in a tweet Tuesday, sharing that a majority of the 20 Republican lawmakers who voted against the measure last week will support the updated resolution, along with members who were out of town during last week’s vote.
Schiff said last week that he is “flattered” by the effort to censure him and suggested the resolution was introduced as a distraction from Trump’s legal woes. The former president was arraigned in Miami earlier this month in connection with a federal probe into his alleged mishandling of classified documents, the same day Luna brought the measure to the floor.
“This is really an effort, at the end of the day, to distract from Donald Trump’s legal problems, to gratify Donald Trump by going after someone they feel was his most effective adversary,” Schiff said on “CNN This Morning.”
He also called the resolution a “terrible abuse of House resources.” The California Democrat previously chaired the House Intelligence Committee and led the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, which resulted in the House voting to impeach the former president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Other House lawmakers have been censured in recent years. Former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only Republicans who sat on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, were censured by the Republican National Committee in February 2022 for opposing Trump and investigating the riot. In November 2021, the House voted 223-207 to censure Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., for posting an anime video that was edited to show him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and attacking President Joe Biden.
Contributing: Ella Lee, USA TODAY
