…consider this coverage of the Jamaal Bowman censure. Some quotes:
- “The House voted mostly along party lines to formally reprimand Rep. Jamaal Bowman over triggering a fire alarm last September, the latest episode of the GOP’s censure ire.” That’s the first sentence, essentially “Republicans pounce.” Bowman broke both a DC misdemeanor law by deliberately pulling a fire alarm without any fire, a federal law by disrupting a vote in Congress, and the House ethics rules as well. Politico frames this as a contrived partisan “gotcha!” by Republicans as in“There they go again, making a big deal out of nothing.” This is ethics corrupting behavior by Politico.
- “Bowman (D-N.Y.) is the third Democrat that Republicans have voted to censure this year.” Same thing: the sentence implies that the censures were just partisan attacks without basis. Twenty-two Democrats joined Republicans in censuring Rep. Tlaib, whose repeated statements and tweets excusing Hamas while rationalizing the anti-Semitic chant “from the river to the sea” were exactly the kind of conduct condemned by the House ethics code. The hyper-partisan conduct in both cases was by the Democrats, most of whom couldn’t bring themselves to enforce Congress’s ethics standards as they must be enforced to protect the integrity of the institution. The House failed to censure Rep. Adam Schiff for his repeated lies in the media about the evidence of Trump campaign with Russia because Democrats protected him. The significance of the three censure votes involving Democrats is that the party’s ethics have rotted so thoroughly that Republican look relatively chaste by comparison.
- “Bowman already pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for pulling the fire alarm in a House office building during a chaotic vote on government funding at the end of September. The lawmaker had also agreed to pay the maximum fine, but some House Republicans who’d been incensed by Bowman’s actions demanded further punishment.” That commentary is moronic, and deliberately misleads readers. Its thrust is “he’s suffered enough,” as if the legal consequences of Bowman’s actions should preclude official sanctions by Congress. They are separate and distinct. Moreover, Bowman’s obvious lies about mistaking the fire alarm for a device that would unlock the door were worthy of House discipline themselves.
- “Some on the right have charged that Bowman triggered the alarm to obstruct or delay the House proceedings that day, though he’s maintained he did not intentionally set off the alarm.” “Some on the right?” Bowman was caught on video doing exactly what he repeatedly claimed he did not do—still claims, in fact. In the video, he doesn’t try to get out of the building; he takes down the two signs that would undermine his lie about finding the doors locked and mistakenly pulling the alarm in a state of confusion and panic. The evidence is clear and undeniable: he intended to pull the alarm. Politico’s report sets out to mislead readers who haven’t followed the story so they will believe there is a legitimate controversy over Bowman’s actions and intent. There isn’t. Democrats decided to support an obvious lie.
Politico is considered a major political news source. It is biased and unreliable.
Ethics Alarms 
“mostly along party lines”
I seem to recall a recent vote, maybe having to do with Trump or January 6, that was described as “bi-partisan” because one or two Republicans sided with the Democrats.
Ring a bell for anyone?
The specific vote does not really matter as much as the apparent double standard in the way people think about things.
[By the way, I don’t mean to imply that the “bi-partisan” comment was made by Politico, but it was likely made by a left-leaning press.]
It’s just another way to manipulate the reader. [I am not sure if anything like this was specifically addressed by Curmie in his recent posts, but it is relevant to that topic.]
-Jut
This is either a better example than I provided in my recent post or a variation on the theme that I didn’t explore sufficiently.
What’s significant here is that with the exception of the phrase “censure ire,” everything in the Politico article is denotatively true: The vote was essentially along party lines. Bowman is the third Democrat to be censured by a majority-Republican body in recent months. He did plead guilty and agree to the maximum fine, and he does deny intentionality (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Connotatively, it’s a different matter. The article is an example of both irrelevant inclusion (e.g.,pleading guilty) and conscious exclusion (e.g.,the video). The essentially party line vote is actually relevant, not because Republicans voted for it, but because Democrats did not. (The same could be said in the other direction for the Santos expulsion vote, although not to the same degree.)
I haven’t regarded Politico as a news source for years; I do find its commentary worth reading from time to time. This is not one of those moments.
I do agree with you regarding the both the factual basis of that article and what I believe is the contra-factual tone of it. But on the other hand, even if I did not, here on this blog we are still able to respectfully disagree. Not always, but I appreciate the capability.
The use of the label ‘bipartisan’ frequently annoys me these days. Passage of the Civil Rights bill was bipartisan, I think the crime bill of a few years ago was bipartisan. Having three Democrats or two Republicans vote for a bill is not, in my opinion, bipartisan. It may be courageous these days, and that’s a symptom of our current troubles.
Digging deeper, part of the problem is the inference that “bipartisan” means something good. It is usually used to make something sound better or more noble. Sometimes that is the case, but sometimes one side is right and the other side is wrong. The Three-Fifths compromise was an attempt to be bipartisan. The 13th amendment vote in the House was mostly “along party lines”.
That’s true — in part because people want you to think that bipartisan means there were some negotiations involved. People know — or would know if they thought about it — that a solution derived from real negotiations or compromise is a lot more likely to stick than something that is strictly along party lines.
The Three Fifths compromise, the whole idea of the Senate, the electoral college idea — there were factions in the Constitutional convention and they ended up coming together with various compromises to create a system of government that they could all live under. I think they did a damn good job — perhaps better than they themselves thought. And it’s lasted more than a few days (or decades).