When the House voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and remove him from committees for posting an edited video showing himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden, more Republicans physically stood with Gosar than voted to censure him. Let that sink in.
About a dozen Republicans literally stood beside Gosar to show their support. Just two—Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both reliable opponents of Republican use of violence—voted to censure him, while one other voted present.
Several of the Republicans who spoke in Gosar’s defense during debate on the censure resolution pointed out that he had taken the video down. So, apparently, no harm, no foul. But it took him two days to do so—and following the censure resolution, he retweeted someone else’s tweet of the very same video before taking that down.
Gosar’s own sister has called him a sociopath on national television, and six of his siblings have participated in heartfelt ads against him. But Gosar being one individual sociopath is not the problem with the Republican Party right now. The 12 House Republicans who put their bodies beside him to show support are part of the problem. The fact that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy not only opposed the censure of one of his members for blasting out a depiction, however fictional, of himself murdering a coworker and attacking the president of the United States, but threatened retribution against Democrats if and when Republicans take the majority in the House, shows the extent of the problem.
McCarthy wasn’t just voting against the censure of his member—he was saying that the censure was so illegitimate as to justify him in planning, well ahead of time, to exact retribution against Democrats. “You censured our guy and removed him from committees for the murder-fantasy video, so we’re going to do the same to your members for … whatever.”
This is, to say the least, a departure from past practice. The last time the House censured one of its members, it was Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel. Rangel was censured for ethics violations including soliciting corporate donations for a center named after him at City College of New York, leaving income and assets off his financial disclosure forms, and not paying taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic. Rangel was censured in 2010, by a Democratic House, with a large majority of Democrats voting to censure him. Democrats provided the majority of votes for censure. Eleven years later, only two Republicans were willing to vote to censure one of their own, and those two are already effectively excommunicated from the party.
Less than three years ago, Republicans stripped then-Rep. Steve King of committee assignments after he said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” They did that themselves. Now, they support Gosar in posting an incitement to violence against a fellow member of Congress and the president of the United States in an identifiably white nationalist context, and one of the people whose expressions of support Gosar quote-tweeted was … Steve King. For a long time, the media reliably portrayed King as a fringe member of the Republican caucus. Now it’s clear that Gosar is in the ascendant wing of the party.
This should be a turning point for people—including many in the traditional media—who have not yet realized that Republican leadership is not going to turn back to following norms and reliably opposing political violence. Republicans have gone from shattering norms nonviolently by doing things like holding a Supreme Court seat open for nearly a year and then filling another Supreme Court seat in a matter of weeks to having integrated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol into their core identity. They have for years been a party ruthlessly committed to building political power by any means at their disposal. They now understand that violence is one of those means.
About a dozen Republicans literally stood beside Gosar to show their support. Just two—Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both reliable opponents of Republican use of violence—voted to censure him, while one other voted present.
Several of the Republicans who spoke in Gosar’s defense during debate on the censure resolution pointed out that he had taken the video down. So, apparently, no harm, no foul. But it took him two days to do so—and following the censure resolution, he retweeted someone else’s tweet of the very same video before taking that down.
Gosar’s own sister has called him a sociopath on national television, and six of his siblings have participated in heartfelt ads against him. But Gosar being one individual sociopath is not the problem with the Republican Party right now. The 12 House Republicans who put their bodies beside him to show support are part of the problem. The fact that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy not only opposed the censure of one of his members for blasting out a depiction, however fictional, of himself murdering a coworker and attacking the president of the United States, but threatened retribution against Democrats if and when Republicans take the majority in the House, shows the extent of the problem.
McCarthy wasn’t just voting against the censure of his member—he was saying that the censure was so illegitimate as to justify him in planning, well ahead of time, to exact retribution against Democrats. “You censured our guy and removed him from committees for the murder-fantasy video, so we’re going to do the same to your members for … whatever.”
This is, to say the least, a departure from past practice. The last time the House censured one of its members, it was Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel. Rangel was censured for ethics violations including soliciting corporate donations for a center named after him at City College of New York, leaving income and assets off his financial disclosure forms, and not paying taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic. Rangel was censured in 2010, by a Democratic House, with a large majority of Democrats voting to censure him. Democrats provided the majority of votes for censure. Eleven years later, only two Republicans were willing to vote to censure one of their own, and those two are already effectively excommunicated from the party.
Less than three years ago, Republicans stripped then-Rep. Steve King of committee assignments after he said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” They did that themselves. Now, they support Gosar in posting an incitement to violence against a fellow member of Congress and the president of the United States in an identifiably white nationalist context, and one of the people whose expressions of support Gosar quote-tweeted was … Steve King. For a long time, the media reliably portrayed King as a fringe member of the Republican caucus. Now it’s clear that Gosar is in the ascendant wing of the party.
This should be a turning point for people—including many in the traditional media—who have not yet realized that Republican leadership is not going to turn back to following norms and reliably opposing political violence. Republicans have gone from shattering norms nonviolently by doing things like holding a Supreme Court seat open for nearly a year and then filling another Supreme Court seat in a matter of weeks to having integrated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol into their core identity. They have for years been a party ruthlessly committed to building political power by any means at their disposal. They now understand that violence is one of those means.