Even by the standards of the raucous House of Representatives, the past week was an exceptionally caustic one, with lawmakers from both parties lobbing or threatening no fewer than a half-dozen censures and official scoldings at one another. The purported offenses ran the gamut. One Democrat plotted to handpick his successor, while another texted with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. A Republican was accused by his colleagues of contracting abuses, faking his military honors and assaulting a woman at his apartment. A third Democrat was indicted on charges that she stole Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. It was a vivid illustration of how official House rebukes, once exceedingly rare and mostly a matter of consensus for the most egregious conduct or illegal acts by a sitting member of Congress, have become commonplace in recent years.
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Five members of the House have been censured since 2021, and several more have faced censure attempts that failed. Before that, the last censure was back in 2010, against Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, a Democrat who had been found guilty of several ethics violations and the first member of either party in nearly three decades to face a censure.
