The U.S. House on Wednesday voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar for tweeting an animated video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being killed. The chamber voted 223-207 in favor of the resolution, with two Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. — siding with Democrats. A censure is the most serious action the House can take to punish a lawmaker short of expulsion from Congress. Gosar, R-Ariz, will be stripped of his committee assignments but will remain a House member. The last time the House voted to censure one of its members was in 2010, against former Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., over ethics violations. It was the 24th time the House had censured a lawmaker in its history.
The tweet, since-deleted showed Gosar and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., as the protagonists of the Japanese anime series Attack on Titan in an altered version of the series’ opening credits as they fly through the air and use swords to fight against Titans, on whom Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden’s faces were photoshopped. “Any anime fans out there?” Gosar wrote on the video. Gosar was defiant about being censured: “I do not espouse violence against anyone. I never have. There is no threat in the cartoon other than the threat that immigration poses to our country.”
Ocasio-Cortez said: “It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong. The glorification of the suggestion of the killing of a colleague is completely unacceptable. And I think that it’s a clear violation of House rules. I think it’s a sad day. But I think that it’s really important for us to be very clear that violence has no place in our political discourse.
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