Yesterday, 20 Republican members of Congress joined with the Democrats to defeat an effort to censure the lying Adam Schiff, who abused his position as head of the House Intelligence Committee to spread the false narrative that President Donald Trump had committed treason in colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election.

Schiff claimed, and continues to claim despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian agent. It’s one of the most breathtaking examples of abuse of the political system in American history. Schiff’s lies are reminiscent of the time Harry Reid took to the Senate floor to accuse Mitt Romney of failing to pay his taxes for a decade, a lie Reid knowingly told as a brazen political attack with no basis in fact whatsoever.

Except this is worse than that. Reid told his Romney lie over a brief time period, and then he basically shut up about it – later justifying his falsehoods by saying “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Schiff’s Trump-Russia hoax campaign is ongoing more than five years after he began it.

You could equate this with Joe McCarthy, perhaps. The difference is that most of what McCarthy said was based in truth. There were communist infiltrators in our armed services, as he said. Some of his particulars were off base, and that ultimately led to his political ruin, but McCarthy generally had it right. Nothing about what Schiff has said continuously is true. We now know all of it was cooked up by operatives within Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as a dirty trick; there has never been a factual basis to the Trump-Russia narrative.

There have to be consequences for this. You can’t just allow somebody like Schiff to use a congressional seat as a platform to defame a sitting president with a known lie. Something has to be done about it.

So Schiff was thrown off the Intelligence Committee. That was an obvious first step. He needs to be thrown out of Congress, but the California electorate isn’t good enough to do that from its end and the House GOP majority isn’t large or convicted enough to refuse to seat him.

But Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) brought a censure resolution against Schiff based on what we already know about his lies.

And it failed yesterday. There were 20 Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to inflict a political punishment on a hack politician poisoning the institution they serve in.

One of them was Garret Graves of Louisiana. And here was Graves’ explanation…

Here’s the link if the video won’t load.

The complaint is that not enough “due process” was given to Schiff before a censure vote, and Graves is saying that once those “t’s” are crossed he’s on board with censuring, fining or expelling Schiff.

And yeah, there is some validity to the idea that you can’t just get together and fine a guy $16 million, which would bankrupt him (probably not), because you’ve decided you don’t like him.

Except that’s a gross mischaracterization of what’s happening here. Adam Schiff did everything he could to start a coup d’etat against a duly elected president based on a campaign of lies. The Durham report laid that out in lurid detail. The point of “due process” is to smoke out the truth of a matter before acting on it, but the truth is well known at this point.

So you’re insisting on a formality whose basis has already been satisfied.

And there is the obvious part of this, which is that Democrats have no such scruples. A Nancy Pelosi-led House of Representatives would have absolutely zero compunction about censuring a Republican who’d done what Schiff has done. And if and when the Democrats retake the House, they’ll gleefully prove it.

Everybody knows this.

And no, standing for “due process” isn’t going to summon up the better angels of their nature.

It’s war. That vote tells us Graves doesn’t want to fight it.

Now – Luna is saying she’ll bring the censure resolution back by the means Graves and the others are insisting on.

20 Republicans voted w/ Dems to stop the ethics investigation, censure, & fine of Adam Schiff.

So there is no confusion (as some did not accurately read the bill) I will be filing a privileged motion to censure & send Schiff to ethics for investigation.

See you next week Adam.

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 14, 2023

And that will mean Graves gets another bite at this apple – assuming the House Ethics Committee doesn’t sit on the Schiff censure issue.

Let’s hope they don’t, and let’s hope this goes back to the floor. And let’s hope that with his “due process” concerns met thanks to the pantomime we’ll be going through, Graves and the others are willing to impose some consequences on Schiff.

Because if he fails again, we’re going to need a new congressman for the Sixth District of Louisiana.