§37 —
On decorum
Democrat
413-2
Two censures, two vote counts, and the counts are the argument. March 2025: a member was censured for heckling the president during a joint address to Congress. The vote was 224 to 198, with two voting present 1. September 2026: the House censured a member of the majority party following its ethics committee's months-long investigation into allegations involving two staff members. That vote was 413 to 2 2.
Set the conduct aside and just read the arithmetic. When the breach was noise during a speech, a quarter of the chamber could not agree it was a breach at all, and the split ran close to the party line. When the breach was the other one, the chamber found 413 votes without difficulty. So the House is perfectly capable of unanimity about behavior. It reaches it when the conduct is indefensible and the finding came from its own investigators, and it loses it when the offense is that somebody interrupted. The word decorum gets spoken in both debates. Only one of the two produced a number that looks like a standard.
Sources
- The House censured Rep. Al Green for heckling during the joint address to Congress; the vote was 224-198-2, March 2025 — Roll Call, 6 March 2025 ↑
- The House voted 413-2 in September 2026 to censure an outgoing member of the majority following a months-long ethics committee investigation into allegations involving two staff members — NPR, 1 September 2026 ↑
Republican
CENSURE
The complaint on this side is that the chamber has stopped behaving like a chamber, and the floor record does support it. In one week in November 2025, House members moved four separate times in forty-eight hours to formally rebuke colleagues 1. The tool being reached for is censure, and it used to be close to unused: 28 members censured since 1832, five of them since 2021 1. That is a real change in a real institution, measured on the institution's own books.
The chair of Oversight has made the same complaint about hearings specifically, naming "repeat offenders of breaking decorum" as a standing problem in the room 2. I would only add the part that makes it worth printing. A standard that is invoked mainly by whoever is behind on the vote is not a standard, it is a procedural move. The test of whether decorum is a value or a lever is whether the chamber applies it when its own side is the one being loud, and the vote counts are where that gets answered.
Sources
“Decorum. I've got the floor record here and it's a short list, which is what makes it useful — twenty-eight censures since 1832, and five since 2021. One member censured for heckling during a joint address; that vote came in 224 to 198. Another censured this month after the ethics committee's investigation; that one came in 413 to 2. Same chamber, same rule book, same word in every speech. Sorry, one thing before you go. When the offense was a noise, the chamber split down the middle. When it was the other thing, it agreed almost unanimously. So the standard exists. It just only gets enforced when the answer is obvious to everybody.”— Lou
“Decorum. Everybody's favorite word, and it only ever comes out of the mouth of whoever's losing the vote. Here's the thing though — they keep a list. Twenty-eight censures since 1832, five of them in the last five years. One of them for shouting. One of them, this month, for what the ethics committee found. The shout took a party-line vote. The other one went 413 to 2. Read those two numbers and tell me which offense the House actually agrees is an offense.”
“Decorum is a bipartisan value that both sides regrettably fall short of, and I'd point out that raising the comparison at all is itself a breach of decorum, which is the real story here if anyone wanted to cover it.”