Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., is pushing to censure Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., over a TV interview in which the Republican congresswoman criticized Rep. Al Green, D-Texas.
Green notably heckled President Donald Trump multiple times during his first address of his second term to Congress last week until House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., ordered the Sergeant at Arms to escort Green from the chamber.
Houlahan submitted a resolution Monday calling to censure Boebert ‘for her recent disparaging and derogatory comments’ about Green.
During a March 7 interview with Real America’s Voice News, Boebert said ‘Al Green was given multiple opportunities to stand down, to sit down, to behave, to show decorum.’
‘For him to go and shake his pimp cane at President Trump was absolutely abhorrent,’ Boebert added.
The resolution said those words uttered by Boebert ‘are disparaging, derogatory, and racist toward another colleague, and are a breach of proper conduct and decorum of the U.S. House of Representatives.’
It calls for Boebert to be censured, ‘forthwith present herself in the well of the House of Representatives for the pronouncement of censure,’ and that Boebert ‘be censured with the public reading of this resolution by the Speaker.’
In a statement, Houlahan said, ‘After my discussion on the House floor last week when Speaker Johnson told me he’d have to censure half the members if he actually enforced the rules of the Congress, I decided to help, and tonight introduced a resolution to censure Representative Boebert for her racist and derogatory statements about Representative Al Green (D-TX).’
At the start of Trump’s address before Congress, Green stood up when the president described his electoral victory as a ‘mandate’ from the American people.
‘You have no mandate! You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!’ Green shouted, waving his cane at Trump.
The lower chamber of Congress voted to censure Green the next day, and Johnson condemned how the Democrat ‘chose to deliberately violate House rules in a manner that we think is probably unprecedented in history.’
Houlahan initially voted to table the motion, but she was among the 10 Democrats who ultimately joined with Republicans to censure Green.
Establishment Democrats and progressives promptly turned on each other over their party’s disrupting behavior during Trump’s address, complaining how they’ve failed to have a unifying message against Republicans.
Houlahan acknowledged in an X post on Thursday that ‘today’s vote to censure my fellow representative was not easy and has angered many of you.’
Speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer afterward, she defended her decision but also criticized past behavior from Republicans in the chamber that she argued also warranted censure.
‘I voted to table that because I think we have much, much better things to do with our time than to continue to do this tit-for-tat nonsense with one another,’ Houlahan told the newspaper. ‘That being said, the motion to table failed, so we don’t have the opportunity to not vote on this. And I believe we need to recognize that we have rules in the House of Representatives and we have standards of decorum that we all presumably agree to, and we all need to agree to those standards so we can get the work for the people done and so we can not be a banana republic.’
After the vote, Houlahan told the Inquirer she pulled Johnson ‘to the side and had a very‚ very strong conversation with him where I explained I voted in favor but I am not OK with arbitrary and capricious applications of the same rule.’
She said she complained about how there was no censure or sanction against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Johnson replied, ‘Well, she just wore a hat.’
But Houlahan argued Greene ‘also yelled at the President of the United States,’ referring to her treatment of former President Joe Biden last year, ‘and I don’t believe it’s OK that she did not have same treatment.’
‘And I think it’s absolute hypocrisy that people after the vote were standing there yelling at Mr. Green when their own colleagues have done very, very similar things, not wearing masks when it was mandated, wearing MAGA hats when there are literally no hats allowed on the floor,’ Houlahan said. ‘We had to make a special exception for wearing hijabs. It’s insane… We need to behave like grown-ups and stop the madness.’
Houlahan said it was a ‘really, really, really hard vote for me,’ but ultimately she did her duty. ‘And it’s frustrating because Al Green’s statement was true,’ Houlahan said. ‘It wasn’t provocative or offensive. It was the truth. But I think each one of us had to make decisions about how we were going to comport ourselves and what was appropriate, and I know each colleague on both sides made those choices, and each one of us knows there are consequences to those choices.’