The House scuttled a Wednesday resolution to censure Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) and remove him from his committees over a swath of personal controversies, capping off days of Republicans battling one another over whether and how to punish other lawmakers.
In a 310-103-12 vote, lawmakers referred to the House Ethics Committee the resolution led by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to censure Mills over allegations of dating violence, stolen valor and improper government contracts. Mills has denied many of those allegations.
Eight Republicans voted against referring the matter to committee: Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Harriet Hageman (Wyo.), Tim Burchett (Tenn.), Kat Cammack (Fla.) and Joe Wilson (S.C.). Democrats were split on the vote. The 10 members of the Ethics committee who will consider the matter voted present, along with Democratic Reps. Jahana Hayes (Conn.) and Jennifer McClellan (Va.).
As the clerk read the censure resolution out loud, Mace, wearing all white, stood and stared intently at Mills, who sat a few feet away in the same row.
They exchanged a few words. Mills later told reporters that Mace said “extremely vulgar” things to him.
“I’ll just put it this way: anything from the p-word, to ‘You’re a POS,’ to F-U, I mean, you could just fill in the blanks on all that,” Mills said. “I just looked at her and said, ‘OK, thank you.'”
“She talks about conduct, and she talks about trying to take the moral ground — I think that she’s the right person to do that,” Mills said.
The vote protects Mills from reprimand for now, but the reprieve might not last long. The House Ethics Committee, hours before the vote, announced it would open an investigative subcommittee to look into the matters surrounding the Floridian.
Mace seethed at the Ethics panel’s move.
“This is a naked attempt to kill my resolution to censure Rep. Cory Mills,” Mace wrote on social media.
When Mills made the motion to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, he said that with his cooperation with the committee, he believed the accusations would be proved false.
The vote came after a week of frustrations among some Republican lawmakers, who had fumed about previous attempts to censure Mills failing and accused their colleagues of cutting deals with Democrats to protect wrongdoers.
Republican anger about censures had boiled over the previous evening after the chamber rejected the resolution to censure Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) over texting with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing. Had the effort succeeded, Democrats were poised to call up their own censure of Mills.
But since it failed, due to three Republicans voting with all Democrats against it, and three more voting “present,” Democrats abandoned the Mills censure — just as they had two times previously.
Boebert erupted at her fellow Republicans — including Mills specifically — on the House floor after the Plaskett vote. And Luna insulated Republican and Democratic leaders were “cutting back-end deals to cover up public corruption in the House of Representatives for both Republican and Democrat members of Congress.”
Some of the Republicans who defected to vote down the Plaskett censure, however, denied there was any shady deal to protect Mills.
“It did not break House rules. So I felt that she did not deserve censureship,” said Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), one of the three Republicans who voted present on the Plaskett resolution. “No one came to me. As a matter of fact, I felt leadership was surprised when I told them I planned on voting no or present.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), one of the three Republicans who voted against censuring Plaskett, said that while she was “foolish,” he was bothered by the prospect of removing her from the House Intelligence Committee for something that was not illegal. Leadership did not ask him to vote no, he said.
“We’re going to have four of these this week. It’s not healthy for the institution. I think we have an Ethics Committee for a reason, and I think we should fall back on that primarily,” Bacon said.
Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) also said he wasn’t asked to vote “no.”
“Leadership did not approach me about this vote. The House already has a clear, established process for evaluating allegations of misconduct: the bipartisan Ethics Committee,” he said. “That process exists to ensure that every member receives due process, that the facts are fully examined, and that discipline is based on findings, not politics. Everyone in this country is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and Congress should follow the same standard.”
But to Mace and others, the personal controversies surrounding Mills are too numerous to ignore — leading her to introduce the measure to reprimand him on Wednesday.
Most recently, a Florida county judge last month granted a restraining order against Mills requested by an ex-girlfriend who accused him of harassment and threatening to release intimate photos of her after their breakup earlier this year. Mills has denied some of those accusations.
Reporting in The Daytona Beach News-Journal and elsewhere questioned how and why he was awarded a Bronze Star, with two service members “disputing that Mills was involved in their rescue or provided live-saving care.” Mills vigorously defended against those claims Wednesday.
“The claims on my valor that she’s pushing are baseless, recycled, and already publicly disproven,” Mills said. “I fully deny them.”
And finally, Mace’s resolution notes the Office of Congressional Conduct found Mills’s companies “may have entered into, held, or enjoyed contracts with federal agencies while he was a Member of Congress in violation of House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law.”
Mills became a target of Mace after the House in September rejected an effort brought by Mace to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) over comments she reposted about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Mills, who faced a retaliatory censure if it succeeded, was the last-minute deciding vote to sink the Omar censure — but denied his vote was a means of self-protection.
“Nancy Mace’s latest stunt is a politically motivated attempt to grab headlines and settle personal scores,” Mills said in a statement.
Updated at 10:55 p.m. EST