Lawmakers on Capitol Hill vote 3-2 to censure Rep. Adam Schiff
(CNN) — Americans’ competing political realities are colliding fantastically on Capitol Hill this week in a public punishment, an ill-fated impeachment effort and the dissection of another special counsel’s report.
First came the rare step of House Republicans voting to publicly censure Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat. Schiff’s alleged crime?
“He put people through four years of an endless impeachment hoax that he knew from the beginning was a lie,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Colorado Republican and a stalwart of the party’s extreme right wing, said on the House floor Wednesday.
It is possible that honest people can disagree over whether the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump were legitimate, but even many Republicans are having trouble with the hop from censuring Schiff in part for his role in impeaching Trump to the Boebert-led effort to impeach President Joe Biden.
“What majority do we want to be,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked his fellow Republicans during a closed-door meeting, a source told CNN’s Capitol Hill team. “Give it right back in two years or hold it for a decade and make real change?”
McCarthy was trying to beat back Boebert’s impeachment effort for now and acknowledged the difficulty of explaining the mixed messages to voters.
It’s not that he’s opposed to impeaching Biden. But McCarthy wants a more measured process to play out.
“I think to prematurely bring something up like that, to have no background in it, it undercuts what we’re doing” at the committee level, McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday.
McCarthy will likely have to make his speech to GOP colleagues more than once.
According to CNN’s report, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has plans to, like Boebert, force impeachment resolution votes on numerous Biden administration officials, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and US Attorney Matthew Graves.
Both the censure and the impeachment resolutions are being offered by individual lawmakers. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida spearheaded the censure drive, and Boebert is forcing the impeachment resolution vote.
Luna’s censure effort was reborn after an earlier version was defeated when 20 Republicans opposed it. They felt the $16 million fine it sought to impose on Schiff was either unconstitutional, unfair or both. The passed version of the resolution dropped the fine.
Democrats on the House floor interrupt Speaker Kevin McCarthy after lawmakers voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a key lawmaker in Democrats’ congressional investigations into former President Donald Trump during his presidency.
