House gets back to work and quickly falls into a cycle of punishing its own

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. House is back in session after a multi-week hiatus, but its agenda has been quickly overtaken by a sudden flurry of censures, reprimands and the investigation of members, leaving little bandwidth for legislating.

With few bills to consider — and no quick fix for the problem of skyrocketing health insurance premiums — the House has instead devoted time to lawmakers’ demands to punish each other for their personal and political transgressions in showy spectacles on and off the chamber floor.

“I feel sorry for this body,” said Del. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands and was the subject of a failed effort by House Republicans to censure and remove her from the House Intelligence Committee.

On Wednesday, an effort to censure another lawmaker, Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., was filed just hours before the House Ethics Committee suddenly announced it would investigate the congressman.

The escalating environment of political scrutiny is leaving the House, with just weeks to go before the end of year, without much time to make progress on unfinished business. Particularly unsettled is whether Congress will be able to deal with the expiration of the health care tax credits on Dec. 31, which threaten to leave millions of Americans unable to afford insurance coverage in the new year.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had insisted that once the government reopened from the federal shutdown, talks would get underway with President Donald Trump on the health care debate. But this first full week back in session has shown few signs of progress on that or other issues, including the routine bills to fund the government and prevent another shutdown.

“It’s time for the House to actually do things that matter for the American people,” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries at his weekly press conference.

Jeffries said the House Republicans were “forced to come crawling back into the Capitol” after their nearly seven-week absence during the shutdown, and “they still haven’t brought a single bill to the floor that actually addresses the high cost of living in the United States.”

“What is wrong with these people?” he asked.

As Johnson tries to exert control over the House, where Republicans have narrow majority control, the GOP speaker’s leadership is being tested in new and confrontational ways by rank-and-file lawmakers. They are seizing on the tools at their disposal to maneuver around the GOP speaker.

Johnson had to reverse course and support the vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files after a mass uprising from lawmakers demanding action. What started as a rogue action by a handful of lawmakers on what’s called a discharge petition became a nearly unanimous roll call, sending the bill to the Senate — and then to Trump to become law.

“Having now forced the vote, none of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency,” Johnson said. “Of course we’re for maximum transparency.”

Republicans, including those from the Freedom Caucus, launched the campaign against Plaskett over text messages she had received from Epstein during a committee hearing with Trump’s former political fixer Michael Cohen in 2019.

GOP Rep. Ralph Norman, who is running for governor in his state of South Carolina, said the text exchanges were improper and he was seeking to remove Plaskett from her role on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

“She did it to herself,” he said during Tuesday’s heated floor debate.

But Plaskett, a former U.S. attorney in New York who had been appointed to the Department of Justice during the Bush administration, defended her actions. She said she was simply interacting with a constituent — Epstein had owned two tiny islands in the U.S. Virgin Islands — one of many people texting as her phone exploded with messages during the high-profile hearing. At the time, it was not publicly known that Epstein was under investigation, she explained.

The effort failed, 214-209, with three Republicans joining the Democrats to oppose the resolution of censure and removal from the Intelligence Committee. Also failing, by a vote of 214-213, was an effort by the Democratic leadership to refer the situation to the Ethics Committee for review.

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, who is also running for governor in South Carolina, filed her resolution against Mills midday Wednesday claiming he brings “discredit” on the House for a long list of alleged transgressions. A Florida judge has granted a protective order against Mills at the request of a former girlfriend who claimed that he threatened to release nude images of her and physically harm her future boyfriends after she broke up with him.

And starting the week was a vote, 236-186, to reprimand Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, D-Ill., after his chief of staff became the only candidate who submitted the paperwork needed to run for the congressional seat once he announced he was not seeking reelection.

There have been at least a half-dozen efforts this year to censure or other reprimand lawmakers, largely from Republicans seeking to punish Democrats — though Democrats have been retaliating with their own threats to file actions against Republicans.

Jeffries said there’s “not enough time in the legislative calendar if Republicans want to go down this road.”

And lawmakers of both parties have used the discharge petition strategy to force issues — like the Epstein files — to the fore over the objections of the GOP leadership.

Johnson has bemoaned the disruptions he has been unable to fully control and repeatedly said he wishes he could be speaker over a “normal” House. But others see this House as the new normal.

“I think it’s indicative of how the House has been for quite some time,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. “And that’s by design. Nothing gets done.”

Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., who faced his own violations with the Ethics Committee in 2020, said the punishments are the new normal.

“It’s being Weaponized. Back and forth. Back and forth,” he said.

“In previous times, you would have gotten fussed at by the speaker saying, please don’t do this.”

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Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.