After days of buildup to a scheduled House vote, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., abruptly withdrew her motion to censure a far-right colleague, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., during a Wednesday night floor session.
Balint’s effort to formally reprimand Greene dates to July, when Vermont’s first-term House member first introduced the motion but did not force a vote on it. A once rarely utilized procedural move in the halls of Congress, a formal censure is generally seen as one step short of expelling a member.
Since entering Congress in 2021, Greene has become a household name for her allegiance to former President Donald Trump after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and for her highly publicized peddling of conspiracy theories around vaccines, election integrity, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and, infamously, “Jewish space lasers.”
“I really see her actions as part of this drive of the extremists within the Republican Party for Americans to hate each other and fear each other,” Balint told VTDigger in an interview Wednesday morning, hours before the scheduled vote that never came.
In July, as Vermont was reeling from that month’s catastrophic flooding, Balint’s campaign sent out a fundraising email announcing her move to censure Greene. The campaign wrote that Balint was seeking to reprimand Greene “for her racist, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic remarks, and dangerous conspiracy theories,” then made a plea for campaign contributions to help “stand up to right-wing extremists here in the halls of Congress.”
At the time, Greene dismissed Balint’s move.
“I don’t know who this freshman Democrat is. They must have terrible fundraising numbers because they’re pulling some ridiculous stunt,” Greene said in July, according to The Hill. “Looks like four pages of slander, because I looked at the first few lines and I was like, ‘That’s not even true.’”
Fast forward to last week when Greene herself introduced a censure resolution against U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of only two Muslims in Congress and the lone Palestinian American serving in the body. Greene in her resolution accused Tlaib of “antisemitic activity,” apparently referring to Tlaib’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinian civilians caught in the crosshairs of the war raging between Israel and Hamas, which has killed thousands of Palestinian and Israeli civilians in a matter of weeks.
It was then, when Greene filed her motion against Tlaib — Balint’s friend and fellow progressive — that Balint said she “felt like such a mama bear.”
“I was like, ‘You are not going after my friend, Marjorie Taylor Greene, when you are the one spreading the antisemitism, the Islamophobia, and you are a corrosive effect on the democracy as a whole,’” Balint told VTDigger.
After sitting on her motion for months, Balint — with the blessing of House Democratic leadership — formally filed her eight-page, 42-count resolution to censure Greene. She told VTDigger she hoped to receive some votes from her Republican colleagues, because “there has to be a bottom.”
“If they can’t look at (42) counts against one of their colleagues and say, ‘This is so far beyond what anyone would expect a member of Congress to do or how they expect them to behave,’” Balint said. “We have to excise the cancer.”
Hours before Wednesday’s scheduled vote, Balint said she hoped to force her GOP colleagues to cast their votes on Greene on the record. But before Balint’s measure came up, Greene’s own motion to censure Tlaib failed, largely because Republican members joined Democrats in rejecting that resolution, some citing concerns over First Amendment rights to free speech.
It was then that Balint pulled her own resolution, before any votes could be cast.
According to the Hill, the two competing measures were largely seen within the halls of Congress as a “tit-for-tat.” Asked by VTDigger on Wednesday whether she was concerned about making enemies with the GOP House majority — particularly at a time in which Vermont is in dire need of federal support to recover from this summer’s floods — Balint replied, “It’s not a tit-for-tat. This is about saving the democracy. It’s pure and simple.”
“Do I really think that me holding back on this is going to make it more possible for these extremists to work with me? No,” Balint said. “They’re not going to work with me anyway.”
