WASHINGTON — During the House’s long 54-day shutdown recess, lawmakers in both parties begged Speaker Mike Johnson to call them back into session.
Now that they’re back, some members are already at each other’s throats and openly defying leadership, while others can’t wait to return home for the holidays.
In just the past 48 hours, members of the House have tried to force votes to formally rebuke individual colleagues four times for alleged bad behavior. Resolutions like that used to be rare, but they’ve become a symbol of the bad blood flowing through this toxic Congress.
One of them succeeded. On Tuesday, the House voted for Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s resolution to rebuke fellow Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia for what she called election subversion.
The same day, the House rejected a resolution censuring Del. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, over her communications with Jeffrey Epstein during a congressional hearing. That resolution was authored by GOP Rep. Ralph Norman, who is running for governor in South Carolina. One of his opponents in that race, Rep. Nancy Mace, on Wednesday brought up her own censure resolution, this one against a fellow Republican, Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, for his alleged misconduct with women and other issues. (Mills has denied wrongdoing.)
Earlier, Democrats had moved to censure Mills but backed off when the Plaskett censure failed.
“I think four censure resolutions in a week says it all. It’s not good for the institution,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told NBC News on Wednesday. “The mob mentality is not healthy.”
“It’s insanity. They want to convict and sentence people, and then send it to Ethics for investigation. Ass backwards,” added another House Republican lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about colleagues. “This is Mace and Norman using their positions for publicity at the expense of the institution.”
Rep. Cory Mills, D-Fla., was the target of two censure resolutions this week.Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
After the Plaskett vote went down in flames, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., a member of the Freedom Caucus that was spearheading the censure, began wagging her finger and lashing out at her GOP colleagues in an F-bomb-laden tirade.
“It was multiple F-bombs,” said one Republican who witnessed it on the floor. “At least one of them that I heard clearly was, ‘What the f— am I doing here?”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., made a brief speech on the House floor after the vote, accusing the leadership in both parties of “cutting backroom deals” to protect their own members, which they’ve denied. After Luna made her point, another member was heard whooping and telling Luna: “Get it, girl!”
Luna then wrote on social media that Mills, a fellow Florida Republican whom she was once close with, is “having lots of issues and should NOT seek re-election.”
Then she trained her fire more directly at Mills. After he posted a statement on social media but disabled the comments on Wednesday, Luna quoted the post and wrote: “Turn your comments on, Mills… Stop bulls—-ing the American people and Florida residents. Get your crap together, not in Congress.”
The Ethics Committee said Wednesday it voted to create a subcommittee to investigate Mills. The House voted 310-103 that evening to refer a censure of Mills to the panel.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., summed up the week this way: “Those who were happy warriors came back happier than ever, and those who were unhappy warriors came back madder than ever. And I think what those 54 days did is it sort of created people going more the way they were going.”
Count Rep. Tim Burchett in the “madder” camp.
The Tennessee Republican declared on social media that he was “ticked off” by the lack of serious commitment to a congressional stock trading ban. The House Administration Committee held a hearing on Wednesday exploring potential policy options to crack down on the practice, but some members want to move faster.
Luna is threatening to use a discharge petition to force floor action on a ban if she doesn’t feel like leadership is making real progress on the issue.
“This is a fist fight, folks,” Burchett said before the hearing. “You know, everybody talks about this place being a dadgum swamp. It’s not a swamp. A swamp is something cool God created. It filters water, animal life lives and flourishes around it. This is a sewer, this was created by man, and it needs to stop.”
The discharge petition is a rare procedural tool that rank-and-file members can use to bypass leadership and force bills to the floor — if they can collect the signatures of half of the House, 218 members.
They’ve historically had limited success in the House, but members have already successfully used a discharge petition twice since coming back into session just over a week ago: one on forcing the release of the Epstein files and another related to federal workers’ union rights. The increasing frequency of going around leadership is a sign of the growing unrest among lawmakers in both parties.
And then there’s the stunning blowup between onetime allies Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and President Donald Trump. The president mocked the GOP congresswoman as “Marjorie Traitor Greene” over the weekend, following months of Greene criticizing her own party on a range of issues. And Greene, who signed the Epstein discharge petition, hit back by insinuating Trump was the traitor.
“He called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition,” Greene said at a news conference Tuesday, flanked by Epstein victims and their family members.
“Let me tell you what a traitor is: A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves,” Greene said ahead of Trump’s White House meeting with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince followed by a black-tie dinner.
Even the usually sunny House speaker has shown visible frustration this week, after the Senate ignored his pleas to amend the Epstein bill and the Senate blindsided the House with a provision allowing senators to sue the DOJ if their phone data is collected without being notified.
Railing against what he called the Senate’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire provision,” Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., directed blame at Speaker Johnson and his GOP leadership team, arguing that had they brought the House back into session sooner, the offending provision might never have made its way into the bill that ended the government shutdown.
“We also need to ask how this was allowed to happen? And I have to tell you, it doesn’t help that the House wasn’t even here. For six straight weeks, House leadership decided to cancel our sessions, every oversight hearing, every markup of legislation, everything, and why to this day, there’s been no coherent rationale offered?” Kiley said in a floor speech Wednesday.
“Now, throughout this time, I warned that this was not only holding back our own legislative priorities but was also making the House irrelevant in any deal to reopen the government,” he said. “And of course, that’s what ended up happening.”
Kiley has also lambasted his own party for starting a nationwide redistricting battle that will likely leave him without a seat in Congress. And adding insult to injury, the GOP’s redrawn Texas map that triggered it all was recently struck down, although the governor is planning to appeal.
As censures and curse words fly around the chamber, members of the Appropriations Committee said they’re just trying to keep their heads down and focus on the work of crafting funding bills to avoid another shutdown on Jan. 30.
“We’re focused on another package of bills before Christmas,” said Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas. “Other members are getting lots of play throwing rocks at each other — including from their own sides.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the sole Palestinian in Congress, who herself was censured in 2023 for her critical remarks about Israel after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that year, said she found the 50-plus days back in her district to be extremely productive, including helping people secure their Social Security benefits.
“The seven weeks I was in the district, overwhelmingly they’re not asking us about Marjorie Taylor Greene or Cory Mills — they are asking us about what to do about the high costs,” Tlaib said in an interview.
Each time someone brings a censure resolution, she added, “I always do pay attention and watch who sends a fundraising email right after.”
