REPORT: GOP Rep. Struck Backroom Deal With Democrats To Avoid Censure: ‘Quid Pro Quo’

A Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives appears to have struck his own deal with House Democrats to spare a “Squad” member from an official censure in exchange for receiving the same reprieve.

Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), who in recent months has been accused of domestic abuse, stolen valor, and financial misconduct, was part of an agreement with Democrats to vote to table a resolution censuring Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for denouncing Republicans’ response to Charlie Kirk’s death. Democrats presented the GOP majority with their own deal: kill Omar’s censure, and we’ll withdraw ours.

The brazen deal resulted in a narrow 214-213 defeat of a motion that would have seen Omar stripped of two committees and one subcommittee for declaring Republicans are “full of s**t” over their denunciations of Kirk’s critics since his assassination.

Fellow “Squad” member Greg Casar (D-TX) introduced a motion to censure Mills immediately after Nancy Mace (R-NC) finished introducing the motion against Omar on Wednesday.

Mills is currently the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he pressured an ex-girlfriend into silence with the threat of releasing nude images of her.

Livid commentators online suggested House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) should have allowed both votes to proceed or gone so far as to push for Mills’ expulsion and held a special election to fill his safely Republican seat.

Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said he coordinated with senior Democratic leaders to put Republicans in a difficult position on the Omar vote.

“They move one, we move one,” a senior House Democrat told Axios.

Once a consequence of egregious malfeasance, congressional censures have increasingly become a tool to punish lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for words or actions that would not normally rise to the level of an ethics investigation.

Omar intimated last week that it was unsurprising to see Kirk killed by firearms after advocating for the Second Amendment.

“But what I do know for sure is that Charlie Kirk was someone who once said, ‘Guns save lives’ after a school shooting,” Omar said. “Charlie was someone who was willing to debate and downplay the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police … downplay slavery and what Black people have gone through in this country by saying Juneteenth should never exist.”

“There is nothing more effed up than to completely pretend that his words and actions have not been recorded and in existence for the last decade or so,” she added.

She then accused President Donald Trump of “incit[ing] violence against people like me.”

Omar has responded to the fallout by calling Kirk’s death “mortifying” and accusing Republicans of taking her comments out of context.

“These people are full of s**t,” Omar told Hasan about Republicans in general. “And it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness, and have, you know, empathy, which Charlie said, ‘No, it shouldn’t exist,’ because that’s a newly created word or something.”