Tensions are running high in Congress. Both parties are firmly against one another.
And this GOP congressmember was smacked by this Democrat for saying these three words.
In a fiery escalation of tensions within the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) has set her sights on Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), introducing a resolution on March 10, 2025, to censure her Republican colleague. The move comes in response to Boebert’s sharp-tongued critique of Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) during a television interview, a salvo that Houlahan and her resolution deem “disparaging, derogatory, and racist.”
The drama traces back to President Donald Trump’s first address of his second term to Congress last week, an event punctuated by Green’s repeated interruptions. Waving his cane and shouting, Green challenged Trump’s claim of an electoral “mandate,” yelling, “You have no mandate! You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”
His outbursts persisted until House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had enough, directing the Sergeant at Arms to usher Green out of the chamber. The House voted the next day to censure Green, with Johnson decrying the Democrat’s actions as a deliberate and possibly unprecedented violation of chamber rules.
BREAKING: Rep Al Green (D-TX) has been REMOVED from US President Trump's address after repeatedly interrupting him and refusing to take his seat pic.twitter.com/ZUr9c1Yy4G
— Hexdline (@HexdlineNews) March 5, 2025
Boebert didn’t hold back when she appeared on Real America’s Voice News on March 7. “Al Green was given multiple opportunities to stand down, to sit down, to behave, to show decorum,” she said, before adding, “For him to go and shake his p*mp cane at President Trump was absolutely abhorrent.”
It’s this comment that Houlahan’s resolution seizes upon, arguing that Boebert’s words crossed a line into unbefitting conduct for a member of Congress. The resolution demands Boebert “forthwith present herself in the well of the House of Representatives for the pronouncement of censure” and face a public reading of the rebuke by the Speaker.
Houlahan, in a statement, tied her push to a recent exchange with Johnson on the House floor. “After my discussion on the House floor last week when Speaker Johnson told me he’d have to censure half the members if he actually enforced the rules of the Congress, I decided to help,” she said, “and tonight introduced a resolution to censure Representative Boebert for her racist and derogatory statements about Representative Al Green (D-TX).”
The censure of Green had already exposed fault lines among Democrats. Houlahan initially moved to table the motion against him but ultimately joined 10 fellow Democrats and the Republicans in voting for it—a decision that sparked intra-party friction.
Progressives and establishment figures traded barbs over the party’s lack of a cohesive stance against Trump and the GOP. In a reflective X post on March 6, Houlahan admitted, “today’s vote to censure my fellow representative was not easy and has angered many of you.”
Speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Houlahan stood by her vote but pointed fingers at Republicans too, citing past antics—like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) yelling at then-President Joe Biden in 2024—that she believes deserved equal reprimand.
“I voted to table that because I think we have much, much better things to do with our time than to continue to do this tit-for-tat nonsense with one another,” she told the paper.
“That being said, the motion to table failed, so we don’t have the opportunity to not vote on this. And I believe we need to recognize that we have rules in the House of Representatives and we have standards of decorum that we all presumably agree to, and we all need to agree to those standards so we can get the work for the people done and so we can not be a banana republic.”
After the Green vote, Houlahan confronted Johnson privately, decrying what she saw as inconsistent rule enforcement. She recalled his dismissive response about Greene—”Well, she just wore a hat”—and countered that Greene “also yelled at the President of the United States.”
Houlahan fumed to the Inquirer, “And I think it’s absolute hypocrisy that people after the vote were standing there yelling at Mr. Green when their own colleagues have done very, very similar things, not wearing masks when it was mandated, wearing MAGA hats when there are literally no hats allowed on the floor. We had to make a special exception for wearing hijabs. It’s insane… We need to behave like grown-ups and stop the madness.”
For Houlahan, the Green vote was agonizing. “It’s frustrating because Al Green’s statement was true,” she said.
“It wasn’t provocative or offensive. It was the truth. But I think each one of us had to make decisions about how we were going to comport ourselves and what was appropriate, and I know each colleague on both sides made those choices, and each one of us knows there are consequences to those choices.”
Now, with her resolution against Boebert, Houlahan is testing whether the House will hold its members to that same standard.
Stay tuned to the Conservative Column.
