On March 4, about halfway through President Trump’s lengthy speech to Congress, House Rep. Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, stood up in the chamber, waved his walking stick at the president and openly disputed Trump’s claim that Trump’s victory last November represented a mandate.

“You have no mandate!” Green shouted. “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”

Green soon went into a combustible rage and, unrelented by a call from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to sit down, kept on shouting, which prompted Johnson to order Green removed from the chamber.

It was a disgraceful performance, but Green’s actions at such legislative gatherings where Democrats and Republicans share the same space have become commonplace, the equivalent of just another day at an office where ridicule and division has reduced the Capitol Building to a veritable cage match of insults, threats, heckling, accusations and near fistfights. 

Witness MAGA hat-wearing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who lobbed four years of public insults at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union addresses; President Trump for referring to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” at his most recent address or, at the same gathering, when Democrats held up ping pong paddles filled with inscriptions of disrespect. These separate acts of defiance have demonstrated absolutely no regard for the sanctity of the forum and reduced our nation’s highest leadership to the level of Tik-Tok self-promoters. 

After long deliberation and less than 48 hours after Green’s childish meltdown, House Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat who represents the citizens of Chester and Berks counties, joined nine other Democrats in voting to censure their colleague in a vote that adopted the resolution by a vote of 224-198-2. After the vote, most Democrats — including the party’s representatives from Pennsylvania, save one — joined in solidarity on the House floor and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

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Within mere minutes of her vote, Houlahan was verbally eviscerated by hundreds of posts to her social media, who referred to her as a “spineless Democrat,” a “sell out,” and a traitor who chose not to side with her fellow Democrats but with the enemy, in this case, Donald Trump. The entries were like a one-way stream of diatribe that with each passing post slowly became a raging river of anger that is still flowing. 

Feeling the need to explain her vote, Houlahan gave an interview to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she said that it was her “duty” to vote for the censure against Green for “breach of proper conduct.”

“And it’s frustrating because Al Green’s statement was true,” Houlahan told the Inquirer. “It wasn’t provocative or offensive. It was the truth. But I think each one of us had to make decisions about how we were going to comport ourselves and what was appropriate, and I know each colleague on both sides made those choices, and each one of us knows there are consequences to those choices.

“I voted to table that because I think we have much, much better things to do with our time than to continue to do this tit-for-tat nonsense with one another,” Houlahan added. “I believe we need to recognize that we have rules in the House of Representatives, and we have standards of decorum that we all presumably agree to, and we all need to agree to those standards so we can get the work for the people done and so we cannot be a banana republic.”

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To those who dragged Houlahan through a molten quagmire for voting to censure Green, their words do not move toward resolution and compromise but further deepen the dark muddy of divisiveness. Indeed, their words are reminiscent of those spewed by the social media bloviators on the other side of the political spectrum, whom they have come to absolutely detest. 

What has been entirely lost in Houlahan’s decision is that it was not only the wise vote, but one that was made not for the Democratic party or even for our country but purely to acknowledge the once time-honored obligations of decency and civility. Should anyone falsely believe the nearly unutterable lie that Houlahan threw her colleague Green under the bus as a scapegoat for her convictions, think again. 

“After the vote, I pulled Speaker [Johnson] to the side and had a very‚ very strong conversation with him where I explained I voted in favor, but I am not OK with arbitrary and capricious applications of the same rule,” Houlahan told the Inquirer. “There was no censure or sanction of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D., Ga.). He said, ‘Well, she just wore a hat.’ She also yelled at the President of the United States [Biden in 2024], and I don’t believe it’s OK that she did not have the same treatment.

“And I think it’s absolute hypocrisy that people after the vote were standing there yelling at Mr. Green when their own colleagues have done very, very similar things, not wearing masks when it was mandated, wearing MAGA hats when there are literally no hats allowed on the floor. We had to make a special exception for wearing hijabs. It’s insane. … We need to behave like grown-ups and stop the madness.”

Then, on March 10, Houlahan introduced resolution seeking to censure Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) alleging the Republican made “racist and derogatory” comments about Green’s protest, saying that Green shook his “pimp cane” at Trump.

To those who have and continue to unleash their venom against Chrissy Houlahan for her vote, may they someday – it may take a miracle for some – choose to honor those who still believe in the vastly devalued currency known as dignity and respect.