Where in the Constitution Is Discipline of Members Covered? Art

"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, miscarry a Member."
—Article 1, department 5, clause 2

The Constitution grants the Business firm broad power to subject its Members for acts that range from criminal misconduct to violations of internal House Rules. While the ramble authority to punish a Fellow member who engages in "disorderly Behaviour" is intended, in role, equally an instrument of individual rebuke, it serves principally to protect the reputation of the institution and to preserve the nobility of its proceedings.

Over the decades, several forms of subject area take evolved in the Firm. The nigh severe blazon of penalization is expulsion from the Firm, which is followed by censure, and finally reprimand. Expulsion, as mandated in the Constitution, requires a two-thirds majority vote. Censure and reprimand, which evolved through House precedent and do, are imposed by a simple majority of the full House.

/tiles/not-collection/2/2009_130_001crop_wood_censure.xml Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
Nearly this object Tammany Hall Democrat Fernando Forest stood at the Speaker's rostrum to be censured for "unparliamentary linguistic communication" in 1868 during the 40th Congress. No stranger to inflammatory oral communication, Woods reportedly had referred to a piece of legislation as "a monstrosity, a measure of the most infamous acts of this infamous Congress."

These are non the but penalties which the Business firm may levy on its Members. Start with the creation of a formal ethics procedure in the tardily 1960s, the Committee on Ethics (which for many years was chosen the Committee on Standards of Official Acquit) has had the power to result a formal "Letter of Reproval." The Ethics Committee may besides opt to annals its disapproval of a particular action using more than informal means. Committee rules, besides equally the rules of the individual party caucuses, provide other means of discipline. For instance, Members may also be fined, stripped of commission leadership positions and seniority, or deprived of other privileges depending on the infractions.

Expulsion

The sternest course of punishment that the Business firm has imposed on its Members is expulsion, an activeness which it has used but five times in more than two centuries.

The Constitution empowers both the Firm and the Senate to expel a sitting Member who engages in "disorderly Behaviour," requiring a two-thirds vote of those nowadays and voting in the chamber to which the Member belongs. As these are internal matters, neither the House nor the Senate requires the concurrence of the other chamber to expel one of its own Members.

In devising this framework, the Constitutional Convention drew upon British legislative tradition as well equally well-nigh 175 years of precedent in the colonial assemblies in North America. Other than the two-thirds requirement, however, the Framers left it up to the House and Senate to determine their own rules and the blazon of beliefs that might warrant expulsion from their corresponding chambers.

Despite this broad grant of authorization, the Framers set the two-thirds threshold because such an action would necessarily remove someone who had been elected by the pop vote of his or her constituents. And though the House has wide discretion to human action in such cases, information technology has demonstrated keen deference to the peoples' choice of their Representatives. 1 measure of that restraint is that the House has never expelled any Member for conduct that took identify before his or her House service. Nor has the Firm removed Members for action in a prior Congress when the electorate insisted on re-electing them to the House despite a record of improper behave.¹

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Almost this object This 1873 Harper'south Weekly drawing illustrates the backwash of the Crédit Mobilier scandal. The House investigated the railroad influence scheme and censured two of its Members—Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York—for using their function for personal proceeds. Cartoonist Thomas Nast decried the widespread graft, implying that the multitude of resolutions that condemned corruption and cached the Business firm rostrum were insincere attempts at reform.

Expulsion has traditionally been reserved as penalisation for only the nearly reprehensible conduct or crimes such every bit treasonous acts against the government. The first three individuals expelled from the Business firm—Missourians John B. Clark and John W. Reid, and Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky—took up arms for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the modern era, expulsion has been used on two other occasions, both of which involved egregious violations of criminal law and/or flagrant abuses of part.

While expulsion has been used sparingly, it should be noted that some Members who faced imminent expulsion from the House take chosen to resign instead. Two Members who sold appointments to U.S. armed forces academies shortly later on the Civil State of war, Southward Carolina'south Benjamin Whittemore and N Carolina'south John DeWeese, resigned their seats before the Firm voted to expel them. Adamant to register its antipathy for their behavior, the House still censured both men, fifty-fifty after their resignations.

Others lost their seats in subsequent elections before the House took formal action. The Framers predictable this possibility and, in role, used it to rationalize the House's two-twelvemonth ballot cycle. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57, "the House of Representatives is so constituted as to support in the members an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people. Before the sentiments impressed on their minds by the mode of their tiptop can be effaced by the practise of power, they will exist compelled to anticipate the moment when their power is to cease, when their practise of information technology is to exist reviewed, and when they must descend to the level from which they were raised; there forever to remain unless a true-blue discharge of their trust shall have established their championship to a renewal of it."^two Come across a list of Members who accept been expelled from the House of Representatives.

Censure

While censure likewise derives from the same constitutional clause, it is not a term the Framers expressly mentioned.³

Censure does not remove a Fellow member from office. Once the Firm approves the sanction by majority vote, the censured Member must stand up in the well of the House ("the bar of the House" was the nineteenth-century term) while the Speaker or presiding officer reads aloud the censure resolution and its preamble equally a form of public rebuke.

Decades before the Firm beginning expelled Members information technology contemplated censure to register its deep disapproval of a Fellow member'due south behavior. Early on in its being, the Business firm considered (only did not ultimately utilize) censure to punish Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Roger Griswold of Connecticut for well-publicized breaches of decorum in early 1798. Lyon had spat on Griswold during a heated argument and, when the House later declined to expel or censure the Vermonter, Griswold sought to defend his accolade by caning him at his desk. Consumed by this "affray," the House created a Committee on Privileges to investigate the incident though information technology ultimately refused to recommend a penalisation after both men promised "to proceed the peace."

Specially during the nineteenth century, when politicians fought duels over affronts to their accolade and reputation, censure emerged as a means to finer challenge a Member's integrity. From the early on 1830s to the tardily 1860s, the Firm censured individuals for unacceptable acquit that occurred largely during floor debate. The beginning time the Firm censured one of its own occurred in 1832 when William Stanbery of Ohio insulted Speaker Andrew Stevenson of Virginia. But since these transgressions did not rise to the level of expulsion, House practice required a unproblematic majority vote on a resolution by those Members present and voting.

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About this record In July 1856, the House voted on a motion to expel Representative Preston Brooks of S Carolina from Congress for his violent assail against Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. As the above vote tally sheet indicates, the Firm did not achieve the two-thirds vote necessary to strip Brooks of his seat, with 121 Members voting to expel him and 95 voting against removal.

Indeed, though the House notably rebuked several Golden Age Members for bribery, well-nigh nineteenth-century censures were handed down for unparliamentary behavior, normally defamatory or insulting statements made against a House colleague. In 1856, in the wake of perhaps the most well-known episode of congressional violence, the Business firm censured Laurence Keitt for assisting fellow Due south Carolinian Preston Brooks equally he brutally assaulted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane on the Senate Floor; the House failed to muster the 2-thirds vote necessary to miscarry Brooks. Believing that putting the question to their constituents would vindicate them, both Keitt and Brooks resigned their seats and subsequently won the special elections to fill their own vacancies. A decade later, Lovell Rousseau of Kentucky suffered the censure punishment for caning Iowan Josiah Grinnell after the two exchanged insults near their respective military service in the Civil War. Like Keitt, Rousseau resigned his seat after the indignity of beingness censured only to have constituents re-elect him. See a list of Members who have been censured by the Business firm of Representatives.

Reprimand

Like censure, the word reprimand does not announced in the Constitution. And its meaning has changed over time. For much of the House'southward history, in fact well into the twentieth century, the word reprimand was used interchangeably with censure. For example, the censure resolution passed confronting Thomas Fifty. Blanton in 1921 directed him to the bar of the House to receive its "reprimand and censure."

The modernistic use of the term reprimand evolved relatively recently, following the creation of a formal ethics process in the late 1960s.⁴ A reprimand registers the Business firm's disapproval for conduct that warrants a less severe rebuke than censure. Typically, in modernistic practice, the Ethics Committee recommends a reprimand (as it does in the instance of censure) past submitting a resolution accompanied with a report to the full House. Reprimand requires a elementary bulk vote on the resolution brought earlier the Business firm and, in some instances, may be implemented only by the adoption of the committee report. A reprimanded Member is not required to stand in the well of the House to accept a exact admonishment. Since the start case of the Firm taking such action in 1976, a total of eleven individuals take been reprimanded by the House. Encounter a list of Members who take been reprimanded by the House of Representatives.

For Further Reading

Brown, Cynthia, "Expulsion, Censure, Reprimand, and Fine: Legislative Subject in the House of Representatives," Written report No. RL31382, 27 June 2016, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC.

Committee on Ethics, "Historical Summary of Carry Cases in the House of Representatives, 1798–2004," http://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/Historical_Chart_Final_Version%20in%20Word_0.pdf (accessed xx March 2017).

_______. "Summary of Activities," http://ethics.house.gov/reports/summary-activities (accessed xx March 2017).

Congressional Record, Firm, 67th Cong., 1st sess. (27 October 1921): 6880–6896.

Hinds, Asher C. Hinds' Precedents of the House of Representatives of the United States, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907): Chapter 52 §1642–1643: 1114–1116.

Maskell, Jack H., "Discipline of Members," in Donald C. Bacon et al., eds, The Encyclopedia of the United states Congress Vol. ii (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995): 641–646.

McKay, William, and Charles Westward. Johnson. Parliament & Congress: Representation & Scrutiny in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford Academy Printing, 2014): 517–546.