Resolution to Censure Schiff Returns to House with a Crucial Tweak That Could Spell Trouble for Him
The House motion to censure Rep. Adam Schiff just got a second chance.
A week ago, the California Democrat dodged receiving a public rebuke from his colleagues because a score of Republicans voted with Democrats to table the resolution, but now the wannabe senator from Southern California is going to face judgment again.
And with the numbers adding up against him, it couldn’t happen to a nastier guy.
Schiff is the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who spent most of 2017 to 2020 repeatedly abusing his position to lie to the American people about supposed evidence in the “Russia collusion” hoax against then-President Donald Trump.
His reputation, and record, of dishonesty were so established that when Republicans took over the House after the 2022 midterms, one of the first things new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did was strip Schiff of even being a member of the committee he once chaired. (McCarthy also kicked Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell off the Intelligence Committee, but there were some other … more exotic reasons for that.)
Last week, a resolution to censure Schiff was tabled on a vote of 225 to 196, with seven members abstaining.
According to the House roll call, the vote on tabling the motion included 20 Republicans in support, two who voted “present” and three who didn’t vote. If all the Republicans who either supported the motion to table the resolution, voted “present” or cast a vote to support the resolution in a new form, it would pass the House with a 221-vote majority, more than 50 percent of the House’s 435 seats.
And pass it might.
For most of the Republicans who voted to table the resolution, the sticking point was that the language of the resolution text included fining Schiff $16 million, or half the estimated cost of the special counsel investigation into the “Russia collusion” hoax.
The Washington Times reported Monday that the resolution’s sponsor, Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna, is planning to introduce the resolution again without the fine.
Censure Schiff Round 2 next week. @RepThomasMassie https://t.co/G1JH6B04pE
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) June 15, 2023
“Censure Schiff Round 2 next week,” she wrote in a Twitter post Thursday.
“Thank you for fixing your bill for next week,” Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, one of the leading GOP opponents of the fine for Schiff, wrote in response.
Massie, who is still battling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a fine she imposed on him for refusing to wear a mask on the House floor during the COVID-19 pandemic, argued that the fine included in Luna’s original resolution was a violation of both the 27th Amendment to the Constitution (which governs compensation for members of the House and Senate) and the Eighth Amendment (which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.)
If there were a constitutional amendment against self-defeating, unnecessary overreach, it would violate that one, too.
Besides making it complicated for a richly deserved censure resolution to pass, arguing that Schiff was 50 percent responsible for the long national nightmare sometimes called “Russiagate” is overstating the weasel’s importance.
Schiff and his congressional role were crucial to the hype against the Trump presidency, of course, but the machinations of the openly corrupted and politicized leaders and agents of the FBI played their role, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were in it up to their necks, and, then there were the “Pulitzer-prize-winning” establishment media outlets and social media barons operating in perfect harmony with the political actors to shape the narrative that helped handicap the Trump presidency.
To paraphrase Ms. Clinton herself, it was a vast, left-wing conspiracy that played out right in front of the entire country, as naked and shameless as a stripper at a Hunter Biden haunt.
Schiff isn’t himself the cause of the rot on Capitol Hill, he’s a symptom of it, like purulent pus from an infected wound.
It’s the political party he represents and its governing philosophy of socialistic thought that’s the real danger. It’s the federal agencies — not just the FBI but the EPA, the Department of Education, and other tentacles of the government that have grown beyond the capacity of the current crop of elected officials in Congress to govern them — and haven’t the honor or decency to govern themselves in ways that respect the American people, that threaten American liberties.
Conservatives call it the “swamp.”
But the unfortunate reality is that it’s the millions of Americans, ignorant, misguided or maliciously participating, who are voting Democrats into office that are the true, lasting danger to the Founders’ experiment in a democratic republic that has lasted so long and done the world so much good.
Censuring Schiff sends a signal that Republicans are serious about addressing the disease he represents. It would also constitute an implicit repudiation of the first Trump impeachment, where Schiff played a starring role.
Democrats love the idea that history books will show Trump’s two impeachments. If this resolution passes, the history books will include an official statement that brands one of the masterminds of those efforts a liar for all time.
Either one is worth far, far more than $16 million by itself. Together, they’re priceless.
And they could be the beginning of changing the millions of minds that really count.
CORRECTION, June 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article spelled Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s first name incorrectly.
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