Randy Fine censure threat could spark tit-for-tat cycle

The House could soon be forced into another tit-for-tat cycle of members attempting to discipline each other by forcing votes on the House floor — and derailing GOP leaders’ control of the chamber.

A massive wave of Democrats have called to formally censure Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and remove him from his committees over a post he made that said “if they force us to choose,” he would choose dogs over Muslims. Democrats roundly decried the post as Islamophobic.

Democrats have not revealed an official censure resolution yet, but House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) strongly indicated Democrats would make such a move.

“Get your members under control, because if you don’t, we will,” Jeffries said in a message to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) during a Wednesday press conference.

Fine, though, is warning that he will counter any such move. Any member can make a privileged motion to require the House to vote on a censure resolution within two legislative days.

“I don’t start fights, but I finish them — and if they go down that road, they won’t like where it ends,” Fine said in an interview with The Hill on Thursday. Asked if that means forcing votes on censures of Democrats, Fine said: “If that’s the road they want to go down, yeah, absolutely.”

That will likely be unwelcome to Johnson, who has not publicly addressed Fine’s post. The Speaker said of the last censure war cycle in November: “Obviously, I’m not in favor of this. I think censure is an extraordinary remedy, extraordinary cases. It should be used sparingly.”

A possible forced censure vote would come on top of another rank-and-file forced vote that threatens to distract from the message Republicans want to push as they blame Democrats for a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, and as Trump delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) plan to trigger a vote to limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.

Fine pointed to Democratic members who are facing federal charges or facing other scrutiny.

“I don’t think the American people are going to say, ‘Wait, you can censure someone for saying Americans have a right to keep their dogs, but you’re good with sexual predator friends. You’re good with thieves. You’re good with people who abuse our ICE workers,’” Fine said.

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) has pleaded not guilty to charges of stealing $5 million in COVID-19 and FEMA funds, funneling the money to her campaign and for personal benefit. And Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) has pleaded not guilty to charges of assaulting and impeding federal officers during an unannounced visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility last May.

Previous attempts to formally reprimand those Democrats and others have been scuttled as members grow tired of policing each others’ every move, and aim to avoid a tit-for-tat censure escalation.

An attempt to censure McIver and remove her from the House Homeland Security Committee, forced by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), failed in September after a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to table the matter, with the GOP members saying it was more prudent to let the House Ethics Committee finish its work.

And Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) had pledged to force a vote to expel Cherfilus-McCormick, which would require a two-thirds majority of the chamber — but backed down after Jeffries indicated Democrats would not support it while waiting for “due process.” The House Ethics Committee is scheduled to hold a rare adjudicatory hearing to consider the  Cherfilus-McCormick matter, and Steube said he will move on his resolution after the panel formally recommends expulsion.

Many Republicans are eager to move on a measure to punish Cherfilus-McCormick as soon as the Ethics panel completes its work, without waiting for the federal charges to be resolved — challenging Democrats to keep with the new precedent set when the House voted to expel fabulist fraudster Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) from the House in 2023 before his trial.

Failed Republican attempts to formally reprimand Democrats haven’t stopped with those facing criminal charges, though.

A resolution to censure and condemn Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.) over documents that showed her consulting with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 hearing was also scuttled after a handful of Republicans voted with Democrats. And a handful of Republicans voted to table a resolution from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for re-posting a video on social media that Mace said “smeared” assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Democrats have also repeatedly threatened to bring up a resolution to censure Republican Rep. Cory Mills (Fla.) over allegations of harassment of an ex-girlfriend and other personal controversies — which they dropped after the attempts to censure Democrats failed. Mace brought up a measure against Mills herself, but that was also unsuccessful as it was referred to the House Ethics Committee.

If Fine or other Republicans move, that tit-for-tat censure cycle could bubble up again.

Because House rules allow any member to force such a vote, there’s nothing to stop members from doing so over the objections of House leadership. Even if it fails, it gives members the opportunity to slam a political opponent.

“What about people who go to Germany and call what happened in Israel a genocide? That’s a pretty inflammatory thing to say in Germany. That’s speech that bothers me. Maybe you should get censured for that,” Fine said, in an apparent reference to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) speech at the Munich Security Conference this month. “If this is the standard to try to censure people, who knows how many dozens of people could end up in that similar situation?”

Fine’s controversial post — “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” — was a response pro-Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani from saying on social media: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

Kiswani has since said the post was a joke as a reference to melting snow exposing dog waste, but Fine said he did not believe that: “In Islam, they don’t like dogs … So when a major Muslim leader says we’ve got to get rid of them, you should take them seriously.”

The backlash to Fine’s post from Democrats included Jeffries calling him “a disgrace to the United States Congress” and “an Islamophobic, disgusting bigot.”

That outrage from Democrats against Fine, but not against Democratic members facing federal charges, has frustrated a number of Republicans who came to Fine’s defense. GOP Reps. Brandon Gill (Texas), Chip Roy (Texas), Mary Miller (Ill.), and Keith Self (Texas) cosponsored a bill a defiant Fine is leading in response to the backlash, to block federal funds from flowing to any state or locality that bans dogs.

On the other side of the Republican conference, some members are privately frustrated at Fine’s comment and how it sparked a news cycle and delivered Democrats a messaging weapon — leading to uncertainty about what the result of a Fine censure would be. Republicans can afford to lose no more than one GOP member on any party-line vote, assuming all members are present and voting.

Still, the desire to avoid a cycle of censures could prompt even the most moderate Republicans to vote against the censure. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) has co-sponsored a resolution with Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) that calls for raising the censure threshold from a simple majority to 60 percent of the House. Johnson has expressed openness to raising the censure threshold.

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