When a member of Congress is censured, it is supposed to be a rare and shameful event. The chastened lawmaker is to stand alone in the well of the House as the speaker reads out the offense they have committed and their infamy is formally recorded in the Congressional Record for posterity.
That’s not what happened on Thursday.
Moments after the House voted 224-198 to censure him over his interruption of President Donald Trump at Tuesday’s joint session, Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas stood in the well, gathered over a dozen of his colleagues around him and started singing.
“We shall overcome — some day!” Green and Co. intoned as Speaker Mike Johnson hammered his gavel, ordering them to stop. They kept it up.
The wild scene on the House floor might have seemed more outrageous if censure itself still held an institutional sting. But it’s no longer the case that censure is rare or even shameful. It’s become, in fact, an increasingly routine feature of Congress.
Over the second half of the 20th century, only five members of Congress received censures. Green on Thursday became the fifth member to be censured in the first half of the 2020s.
Green’s behavior would have earned him reproval in any era, although it is hard to imagine it happening at any other time. Sitting almost front and center in the House chamber Tuesday, Green got up and waved his cane, shouting at Trump, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” repeatedly until Johnson ordered him ejected.
The Houston Democrat has long been a quirky character in Congress, with his long ponytail, gold-headed cane and unending desire to impeach Trump, and his trip to center stage in national politics was hardly met with reluctance.
Asked Wednesday for a response to the censure efforts, he said, “Guilty.” His actions, he added, weren’t “planned” or “contrived,” but undertaken in the spirit of the late John Lewis: “You get in the way. You sometimes create a disturbance, but you have to be willing to suffer the consequences, and suffer the consequences.”
As he prepared for his censure Thursday, Green dressed in all black, the only spark of color coming from the silver text of the Constitution printed on his tie. He sat mostly by himself in the same seat in which he interrupted Trump. As the vote censuring him gaveled to a close — with 10 Democrats joining every Republican in favor — a fellow censuree joined him: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who was sanctioned for anti-Israel comments in 2023, shortly after Hamas launched its war against the Jewish state.
Then Green stood in the well, surrounded by colleagues. That it itself wasn’t unprecedented: The tradition of censured members standing alone to face their colleagues’ judgment started to erode in 2021, when Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) was joined by nearly 20 fellow members of the House Freedom Caucus after being condemned for sharing an anime video depicting the mock murder of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Two years later, progressives stood with Tlaib and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who was censured after pleading guilty to pulling a false fire alarm, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was surrounded by what seemed be most of the Democratic Caucus in 2023 when he was censured on a party-line vote for his past comments on ties between Trump and Russia.
In each of those past instances, the speaker was able to deliver his verbal reproach. It didn’t happen this time. Green joined with his colleagues, many from the Congressional Black Caucus, and sang verse after verse of the civil rights anthem as he waved his cane in the air.
Johnson feebly tried to gavel down the impromptu chorus. Some Republicans shouted “You’re next!” at the singing Democrats, with Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) yelling straight down the main aisle at the singers. Others just shrugged and walked off to catch their flights home.
Eventually, Johnson gave up, placed the House in recess and went off to express his disappointment to a Fox News camera posted only feet outside the chamber. Was the censure official without the reading of the reprimand? According to Johnson it was: “Yeah, we just did it,” he told Fox viewers.
Meanwhile, on the floor, it wasn’t over. The singing died down, and the arguments heated up. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) exchanged words with a Keystone State colleague, GOP Rep. Dan Meuser. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) had a heated exchange of his own with Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio).
It felt like a hockey fight with no punches thrown — at least not this time. In the middle of it all, Green slipped off the floor, exchanging hugs with colleagues on the way.
He returned to the floor about two hours later, this time to deliver a speech about his gesture of protest. Green acknowledged the singing was “incivil” but that it was a direct response to Trump’s repeated personal attacks on members of Congress and his behavior otherwise.
“There comes a time when you cannot allow the president’s incivility to take advantage of our civility,” he said as he went on to argue for Trump’s impeachment and removal.
“There comes a time when you cannot allow the president’s incivility to take advantage of our civility.”
Rep. Al Green
Meanwhile, the wheel of political grievance was making its next turn. The House Freedom Caucus said it was introducing a resolution to strip Green of all of his committee assignments, while Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn) went further and proposed dropping all of those who stood with the Texas Democrat from their committees. Trump himself weighed in with Fox News, calling Green “a low IQ individual” who should have to take an intelligence test to stay in Congress.
Put another way, it felt like the continuation of a bipartisan cycle of performative provocation and that the norms that once bound America’s democratic institutions together are increasingly as antiquated as the spittoons that once sat on the House floor.
It was different not so long ago. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) was given a formal reprimand (a lighter sanction than censure) for shouting “you lie” during President Barack Obama’s 2009 address to Congress. Even today, Wilson gives the sense that he’s still mortified by his actions.
In an interview Wednesday, Wilson recalled how he apologized right away to then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and stressed that his exclamation was “totally unintentional as a town hall moment.” His advice came across as quaint: “If people do something that is inappropriate, like interrupt the president, they should apologize right away.”
