House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy argued that the censure vote against Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar shows that Congress, under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, is broken.
“This Congress will go down in history as the broken Congress,” McCarthy said in a speech on the House floor Wednesday. “House Democrats have nearly every rule and standard in order to silence dissidents and stack the deck for their radical, unpopular agenda.”
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He mentioned procedural rule changes that the minority party uses to push back on the majority party, Democrats voting to impeach former President Donald Trump twice, enabling members to vote remotely by proxy rather than in-person on the House floor due to COVID-19, and Pelosi vetoing members that McCarthy picked to sit on the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“The speaker is burning down the House on the way out the door,” McCarthy said.
He laid out a number of examples that he said show “rules for me but not for thee” of Democrats refusing to hold their members accountable for their comments, including:
- California Rep. Maxine Waters’s comments urging Black Lives Matter protesters to become “more confrontational” if police officer Derek Chauvin was not found guilty on all charges for the death of George Floyd.
- New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, tweeting last week that Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who is on trial and claiming self-defense, should be imprisoned and never let out despite the trial for the teenager still being underway.
- California Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, saying he did not regret promoting British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier.
- Pelosi saying she did not regret her comments after the House parliamentarian issued a rare rebuke for making a personal attack on the House floor.
- Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar making comments that many argue are antisemitic.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives is set to censure Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments over an anime video he posted that depicted him fighting Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden.
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McCarthy alleged that when he asked Democratic leadership about the censure vote, they had not watched the video. He reiterated that Gosar took the video down once McCarthy talked to him.
“The House is weaker, more partisan, and more self-focused today than when Speaker Pelosi became speaker less than four years ago. Future Congress will suffer for it,” McCarthy said.
