A formal House reprimand didn’t contain the fallout from Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) interrupting President Trump’s speech to Congress, showing how petty fights and demands for retribution have become an increasingly prominent part of business on the House floor.
The House Freedom Caucus is asking Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to hold a vote next week on removing Green from his committees. And Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) could force a vote on another measure to remove Democrats from committees if they were part of the group that sang “We Shall Overcome” and got in a yelling match with Republicans on the House floor during Green’s censure.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in response called the Republicans “malignant clowns” and called Ogles a “complete and total fraud,” warning: “Don’t make me expose you to folks who don’t know you.”
Johnson said ahead of the Green vote that the censure, which did not result in punishment beyond acting as a formal slap on the wrist, was appropriate, even if some members wanted to go further. But asked about the Freedom Caucus push to strip Green of his committee assignments, Johnson did not rule it out.
“I talked to Freedom Caucus members and other Republicans that are deeply concerned about this. They say we have got to restore control one way or the other,” Johnson said on Fox News on Friday. “And there need to be real consequences. And it’s something we’ll be looking at early next week.”
Formal censures, reprimands, and removal from committee posts have become an increasingly common occurrence in the House recent years, as partisan tensions have soared. Four of the nine censures cleared by the House in the past 100 years occurred in 2021 or later.
In 2021, when the House was under Democratic control, the chamber removed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from her committee assignments over her past embrace of conspiracy theories. Later in the year, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) was censured and removed from committees after he posted an anime video that depicted violence against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
When Republicans took power in 2023, they responded in kind, with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) removing then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. The House also removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Later in the year, Republicans voted to censure Schiff for “misleading the American public,” Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) over comments related to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and then-Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) for falsely pulling a fire alarm.
Members of the House has gotten so used to bringing up censures to police their own that there was a scramble among Republicans to be the one to sponsor the formal rebuke against Green.
Before Trump’s speech even started, the House Freedom Caucus board released a statement forecasting its intention to censure any Democrat who disrupted the address.
The morning after that happened, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) — who left the Freedom Caucus last year after the group booted Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) — started circulating at 9 a.m. a resolution to censure Green, getting support from nearly 30 co-sponsors, including a number of fellow Texans.
Twenty-five minutes later, before Nehls’s effort was public, the House Freedom Caucus posted on the social platform X that it would introduce a censure against Green. But it was Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) who ultimately got the censure resolution that was backed by leadership, with Johnson saying it was “the first one outta the gate.”
Green, who has represented the Houston area in Congress for two decades, marks the first lawmaker in known history to be removed from the House chamber during a president’s address to Congress.
Holding up his cane, Green heckled Trump, saying he did not have a mandate to make changes to Medicaid, and ignoring requests from the Speaker to maintain decorum. Other Democrats protested Trump by holding up signs or walking out of the speech.
The overall scene was dramatically more confrontational than one of the other few incidents in recent decades that prompted another formal wrist-slap from the House.
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) faced a formal reprimand, which is a less severe formal rebuke of a member than censure, in 2009 after he interjected during former President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, yelling : “You lie!”
Wilson, reflecting on that moment and comparing it with Green, saw a distinction between his action and Green’s.
“I did an unintended town hall moment, as opposed to an intentional standing up,” Wilson said. “Mine was a millisecond.”
The censures reflect the overall trend in the House to be more rowdy and confrontational — a dynamic that does not always prompt formal disapproval resolutions.
Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) interjected during multiple State of the Union addresses by former President Biden.
The Democrats who surrounded Green on the floor as he faced censure argued that there was a partisan double-standard, with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) pointing to Greene wearing a red cap to Trump’s address that said “Trump Was Right About Everything,” which is in violation of House rules.
“We had two Greens, members of Congress, who violated the House rules. Only one of them was kicked out. And everybody’s trying to figure out, what is the difference?” Cleaver said.
Green said after the censure that while he “was prepared to suffer the consequences” for his actions, he did not regret his protest during Trump’s speech.
