Ultra-progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman from New York was censured in the House on Thursday for pulling a House fire alarm even though there wasn’t an emergency.
On Thursday, the House voted 214-191 to censure Bowman. The move doesn’t have an official penalty associated with it, though it does serve as a public admonition that something a lawmaker did was officially unacceptable to the members of the chamber.
Bowman becomes the third Democrat to be censured in the House since June.
Once the resolution passed, House Speaker Mike Johnson asked Bowman to go to the well of the chamber, where the speaker announced the censure publicly.
Like many of his other cronies in the “Squad” in the House, Bowman was defiant after the censure was announced. He said it was just “another example of how the Republican Party is not serious about governing.”
He continued:
“They have no ideas, they have no policies, they can’t inspire the American people, so they focused on censuring me even though the fire alarm incident I took full responsibility right away.”
In September, video caught Bowman pulling a fire alarm at the Cannon House Office Building. Speculation was that he did so to delay a vote that the House was just about to take on a government funding bill.
He has consistently denied that he pulled the alarm to delay the vote, saying that he was trying to open a door to the chamber so that he could vote.
He explained:
“I was trying to get to a door. I thought the alarm would open the door, and I pulled the fire alarm to open the door by accident. … I was just trying to get my vote and the door that’s usually open wasn’t open, it was closed.”
Republicans obviously didn’t buy that excuse, and moved forward with the censure vote as a way to call him out for his actions in an official capacity.
The building had to be evacuated after the alarm was pulled.
The DC attorney general charged Bowman in October for his actions. The congressman pleaded guilty to falsely triggering a fire alarm in the House building, which is a misdemeanor.
Representative Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan, put the censure resolution forward. She wrote about it on the social media platform X:
“Nobody is above the law, Congressmen included.”
Part of the resolution said that if Bowman ended up being censured, he had to present himself in the House well, where the censure notice would then be read.
Democrats tried to block the censure vote on Wednesday, but that failed 201-216, which paved the way for the full censure vote to take place Thursday.
Since Republicans took control of the House, they’ve also voted to censure Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib because of comments she’s made that were critical of Israel and supported Palestinians as the war between Hamas and Israel wages on.
The House also censured California Representative Adam Schiff in June.
