The House of Representatives voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of committee assignments on Wednesday after the Arizona Republican posted an animated video depicting him murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and assaulting President Joe Biden.
The final vote was 223-207. Republican Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney joined all Democrats in voting for the resolution.
It was the first time in more than a decade that the lower chamber censured one of its members.
The video in question, posted to Gosar’s social media accounts last week, appears to be a crudely altered version of a popular Japanese series. It depicts Gosar cutting off the head of Ocasio-Cortez and swinging swords at Biden.
Gosar’s staff apparently made the video. He tweeted, “The creativity of my team is off the hook.”
Gosar deleted the posts, but refused to apologize. “It is a symbolic cartoon,” he said in a statement. “It is not real life.”
On the House floor before the vote, Gosar continued to act defiantly, at one point comparing himself to Alexander Hamilton, who he said was the first representative to be threatened with a censure.
“No matter how much the left tries to quiet me, I will continue to speak out,” Gosar said.
According to POLITICO, GOP leaders in the House encouraged their caucus to vote against Wednesday’s censure, calling it a “dangerous precedent.” Gosar is one of the most enthusiastic defenders of Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
But Democrats were united in their outrage. Before the censure was passed, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “an emergency.”
“It’s violence against women, workplace harassment,” she explained, adding “It’s outrageous on the part of the Republican leadership not to act on this.”
While the resolution was being debated, Ocasio-Cortez asked “Will we live up to the promises that we make our children, that this is a place where we will defend one another regardless of belief? That our core human dignity matters?”
“Does anyone one in this chamber find this behavior acceptable?” Ocasio-Cortez said, looking over to the GOP side.
“Is there no decorum around here anymore? Is there no decency?” echoed Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat from Massachusetts. “Threats against members of Congress are on the rise. We cannot sit back and accept actions like this as if they are the new normal.”
On the House floor, McGovern added, “When a member uses taxpayer money to produce a video encouraging violence against another member, they should lose the privilege of serving on a committee.” Gosar had served alongside Ocasio-Cortez on the Oversight Committee.
“We have people out there being influenced by garbage like this,” McGovern continued. “We have members being forced to pay for security. We have members getting death threats. This is dangerous stuff that we’re talking about here.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer added, “We know where the glorification and promotion of violence leads, we have seen it this year, previous years, piercing tweets become sharp knives. Fiery words bring out deadly firearms and cartoon killing begets real life bloodshed.”
“No one, Democrat or Republican ought to be involved to engage in the promotion of violence against a fellow member or indeed a fellow American,” the Maryland Democrat added.
POLITICO provides important context:
Party relations in the House have hit new lows over disputes that range from mask mandates in the chamber to Republican lawmakers trying to shrug off the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Although some of those divisions — such as the mask mandate — have mainly been used as culture war targets to rile up a political base, other strife has had further-reaching and more dangerous consequences. Some hard-line House Republicans have called for members of their party who voted for the infrastructure package to face punishment and removal from their committees.
Since then, some of the 13 House Republicans who voted for the package have received death threats amid the backlash from the party’s right flank.
Rep. Charlie Rangel, the long serving New York Democrat, was the last House member to be censured. In 2010, an investigation by the Ethics Committee found that he was guilty of tax evasion, among other improprieties.