The House of Representatives voted Thursday morning to censure 77-year-old Representative Al Green, a Houston, Texas Democrat, for disrupting President Donald Trump’s fascistic address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.
The vote was 224-198, with 10 Democrats joining a unanimous Republican caucus to rebuke one of their own members for daring to speak out against Trump’s lies.
Green rose to his feet during the first minutes of Trump’s speech, after Trump claimed he had a massive mandate for his ultra-right policies, despite his narrow victory at the polls last November. Green shook his cane at the president, while declaring that he had no mandate to slash Medicaid, the program on which more than a quarter of Green’s own constituents rely for health coverage.
After Green refused several demands to sit down, House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the sergeant-at-arms to remove him from the chamber, while the Republicans present began chanting “USA, USA.” Only two Democrats followed Green out, while the rest sat and listened in silence to Trump’s interminable litany of lies and provocations, occasionally flipping up signs the size of ping-pong paddles as their sole show of opposition.
On Wednesday afternoon, after Johnson brought up a motion to censure Green, the House voted narrowly and by a straight party-line vote, 211-209, to reject a Democratic motion to table the censure resolution. The resolution was then brought to a vote on the next morning.
After its passage, Green was summoned to the well of the chamber to have the censure resolution formally read out to him. Several dozen members of the Democratic caucus rose and accompanied him, while singing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” This touched off screaming matches between Democrats and Republicans until Johnson ultimately declared a recess.
The House Freedom Caucus, the most right-wing faction of the House Republicans, announced it would propose a resolution to strip Green of his committee assignments and bring it to the floor of the House next week.
Later, fascist Republican Andy Ogles of Tennessee released a resolution he said he would introduce next week to punish all Democrats who participated in the “disruption” of Thursday’s proceeding—by joining Green in the well of the House—by depriving them of their committee assignments for an entire year.
A similar measure was undertaken in 2019 against fascist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, but only because she had made thinly veiled public death threats against three Democratic congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Greene, Lauren Boebert and several other Republicans also vocally interrupted addresses by President Joe Biden to Congress, but were neither censured nor otherwise reprimanded. Greene, Boebert and the other Republican interrupters, as well as Republican Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who shouted “you lie” during a speech by President Barack Obama—the first such action in modern times—all voted to censure Al Green for his heckling of Trump.
The cynicism of the Republicans is only matched by the spinelessness of the Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declined to “whip” the vote on Green’s censure, telling members merely to “vote their conscience.”
Ten Democrats took the opportunity to side with Trump and the Republicans: Ami Bera and Jim Costa of California, Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi of New York, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Jim Himes of Connecticut, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Ed Case of Hawaii.
All ten stand on the right wing of the Democratic Party. Six of the ten come from very competitive districts, including three from districts carried by Trump in last year’s presidential election. Of the remaining four, Houlahan is a former military officer, Himes is ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Moskowitz is a rabid Zionist who has joined with Republicans in witch-hunting protests against the genocide in Gaza.
Speaking on CNN, Himes said, “I have no love for Donald Trump, but I do have reverence for the Office of the President.”
Houlahan, speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer, said, “Immediately following the vote I met with a three-star general in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency to talk about cuts there, and the consequences of that to our intelligence community, and that’s my way of working through all these atrocities this administration is leveling.”
In subsequent remarks to the House, Al Green defended his interruption of Trump. “I heard the speaker when he said that I should cease. I did not, and I did not with intentionality. It was not done out of a burst of emotion,” he said. “I think that on some questions, questions of conscience, you have to be willing to suffer the consequences. And I have said I will. I will suffer whatever the consequences are, because I don’t believe that in the richest country in the world, people should be without good healthcare.”
He said that his “positive, righteous incivility” was in response to the “ignoble incivility” from Trump, who had called Democratic members of Congress “lunatics” during his speech Tuesday night. While any member of the House who used such a term in debate would have been interrupted and his words would be stricken from the record, there was of course no rebuke to Trump for his unprecedented diatribe against the opposition party.
If Al Green’s protest was an empty gesture—and it certainly was—there was nothing empty about the decision of the Democratic congressional leadership to stay silent and complicit as the fascist president vilified them and lied endlessly to the American people. The Democrats will do nothing to fight Trump, even when their own members are under public attack.
There are obvious class reasons for this: The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, is a party of the American financial oligarchy. The Democrats oppose Trump only on those issues on which the oligarchy itself is divided, as over the war against Russia in Ukraine. On the most basic class questions, above all the attack on the working class and the gutting of social programs and democratic rights to pay for the crisis of American and world capitalism, the two parties stand together.