Rep. Nancy Mace’s resolution to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar over her comments about assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk failed in a House vote Wednesday.
Four House Republicans joined with all the chamber’s Democrats in a 214-213 vote to table the motion.
GOP Reps. Mike Flood of Nebraska, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California and Cory Mills of Florida helped Ms. Omar avoid censure and loss of her seat on committees.
“Thank you to my colleagues for having my back and not furthering lies on the House floor,” Ms. Omar, Minnesota Democrat, wrote on X. “Appreciate them safeguarding First Amendment protections and the usage of the censure. Finally some sanity in the House.”
Ms. Mace, South Carolina Republican, introduced the resolution Tuesday to censure Ms. Omar and remove her from the Committee on Education and Workforce and the Committee on the Budget.
Ms. Mace said the Democrats and four Republicans “sold out and chose to protect Ilhan Omar, a woman who mocked the cold-blooded assassination of an innocent American husband and father, who has openly supported ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, and who has repeatedly incited political violence.”
“They didn’t stand with Charlie Kirk. They didn’t stand with the millions of Americans mourning his death. They stood with the one who mocked his legacy. They showed us exactly who they are, and we won’t forget,” she said in a statement.
Mr. McClintock called Ms. Omar’s comments, “vile and contemptible.”
“They deserve the harshest criticism of every man and woman of good will. But this disgusting and hateful speech is still speech and is protected by our First Amendment. Censure is formal punishment by the House and we have already gone too far down this road,” he wrote on X. “Omar’s comments were not made in the House and even if they were, they broke no House rules. A free society depends on tolerating ALL speech — even hateful speech — confident that the best way to sort good from evil is to put the two side by side and trust the people to know the difference. Congress exists for this purpose. For this reason, I voted to table the censure resolution.”
Mr. Hurd and Mr. Mills shared similar sentiments on their X pages.
The resolution pointed to examples of Ms. Omar disparaging Mr. Kirk, including in an interview with left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan on his platform, Zeteo.
In the interview, she said Republicans are “full of s—-” for attacking the left over Mr. Kirk’s death and said it was “really mortifying” to hear the news of Mr. Kirk’s death and see the videos.
“You have people like Nancy Mace, who constantly harass, you know, people that she finds inferior and wants them not to exist in this country or ever,” she said. “You have people like Donald Trump who has incited violence against people like me.
“These people are full of s—-, and it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness,” she said.
Another example was Ms. Omar reposing a video on X that called Mr. Kirk a “reprehensible human being [and] stochastic terrorist.”
Ms. Omar argued that she never said those things.
“Fun fact: Nancy Mace is trying to censure me over comments I never said,” she wrote on X on Tuesday. “This is all an attempt to push a false story so she can fundraise and boost her run for governor.”
Ms. Mace is running for South Carolina governor.
The tabled motion was celebrated by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, which called it a “dishonest and racist campaign to silence the nation’s most prominent Muslim congresswoman.”
“We thank the four Republicans who joined Democrats in doing the right thing and rejecting this bad-faith effort,” said CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw. “But this fight is not over. Rep. Mace and her allies may try again, and we must remain vigilant against any renewed effort to punish Rep. Omar for words she never said while ignoring the real hate speech and genocidal rhetoric coming from other members of Congress.”
