I bow to nobody in my criticism of the way House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff is conducting the presidential impeachment investigation. But the planned attempt by House Republicans to officially censure Schiff is a dishonest waste of time.
The resolution against the California Democrat is misguided because it cheapens the power and meaning of censure. It also flagrantly misstates the case against him.
In an age when a sense of public shame is vanishing, much of the American public might not understand the importance of official censure. In the House of Representatives, censure is the harshest punishment short of actual expulsion that members can inflict upon their fellows. It requires the offending member to stand in the House chamber as official charges are outlined against him and the vote against him is tallied. Back when shame meant something, censure was a nearly mortifying penalty.
In the history of the United States, the House has censured its own members only 23 times, and only five times in the past 98 years. Three of those five were for serious financial misconduct, and two for sexual misconduct with a House page. All five are obviously significant misbehavior.
Yet tonight, almost the entire Republican membership of the House wants to censure — not “reprimand,” the milder rebuke — Schiff for the sins of exaggerating claims against President Trump and for being duped by Ukrainian comedians who pranked him, claiming to have incriminating evidence on Trump.
This resolution is a pluperfect example of people throwing stones from their own glass houses. If the House were to censure all of its members who exaggerated the perfidy of their rivals, the remaining unsullied congressmen could probably caucus in a broom closet. In fact, if the censure resolution’s sponsors held themselves to their own standards, the censure resolution would be grounds for censuring themselves, because the resolution flagrantly exaggerates the case against Schiff.
Here, in the resolution’s own words, is the first and supposedly worst of Schiff’s violations: “House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff purported to relay the content of the phone call to the American people … Instead of quoting directly from the available transcript, Chairman Schiff manufactured a false retelling of the conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky, [and] this egregiously false and fabricated retelling had no relationship to the call itself.”
Nonsense. The complaint involves a 61-second portion of a nine-minute opening statement by Schiff at a recent committee meeting. In it, rather than cite directly from the transcript of Trump’s 30-minute phone call with the Ukrainian president, Schiff paraphrased it both for concision and to emphasize his interpretation of the president’s message. This is ordinary behavior, not shameful or censure-worthy. In almost every hearing on Capitol Hill, not to mention in ordinary conversation in our daily lives, people shorten, summarize, and interpret other people’s statements, and perhaps they exaggerate sometimes. But Schiff was entirely honest about the fact that this had been his aim. He began his summary by saying this: “Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicated …”
The censure motion contains the lie that Schiff’s “egregiously false and fabricated retelling had no relationship to the call itself.” Wrong. Only five seconds of Schiff’s statement came close to fitting that description, while, as Politifact wrote, the bulk was “mostly accurate save for a few strays and exaggerations.”
Indeed, one might say that this censure motion is an egregiously false and fabricated retelling that had no relationship to the Schiff’s orations itself.
This censure resolution is an abasement of the House’s own purported standards. It is a sham. Every Republican with respect for the institution should join Democrats in killing it.
