House to censure Schiff over comments
WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to censure California Representative Adam Schiff for comments he made several years ago about investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, rebuking the Democrat and frequent critic of the former president along party lines.
Schiff, who will stand in front of the House while the resolution is read, becomes the 25th House lawmaker to be censured. He was defiant ahead of the vote, saying he will wear the formal disapproval as a “badge of honor” and charged his GOP colleagues of doing the former president’s bidding.
“I will not yield,” Schiff, who is running for the Senate, said during debate over the measure. “Not one inch.”
More than 20 Republicans voted with Democrats last week to block the censure resolution, but they changed their votes this week after the measure’s sponsor, Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, removed a provision that could have fined Schiff $16 million if the House Ethics Committee determined he lied. Several of the Republicans who opposed the resolution last week said they opposed fining a member of Congress in that manner.
The final vote was 213-209. The revised resolution says Schiff held positions of power during Trump’s presidency and “abused this trust by saying there was evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.” Schiff was one of the most outspoken critics of the former president as both the Justice Department and the Republican-led House launched investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia in 2017. Both investigations concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election but neither found evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
“Representative Schiff purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people,” the resolution said.
Schiff, the former Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, has long been a top Republican political target. Soon after taking back the majority this year, Republicans blocked him from sitting on the intelligence panel.
The House has only censured two other lawmakers in the last 20 years. Republican Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona was censured in 2021 for tweeting an animated video that depicted him striking Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, with a sword. Former Democratic representative Charlie Rangel of New York was censured in 2010 for serious financial and campaign misconduct.
The censure itself carries no practical effect, except to provide a historic footnote. But the GOP resolution would also launch an ethics investigation into Schiff ’s conduct.
While Schiff did not initiate the 2017 congressional investigation into Trump’s Russia ties — then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican who later became one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, started it — Republicans arguing in favor of his censure Wednesday blamed him for what they said was the fallout of that probe, and of the separate investigation started that same year by Trump’s own Justice Department.
Democrats aggressively defended their colleague. Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who led Trump's second impeachment, called the effort an “embarrassing revenge tour on behalf of Donald Trump.”