(WASHINGTON) — In a a rare move, the House passed a censure resolution along party lines on Wednesday night against Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. — punishing one of the chamber’s own members and inflaming rhetoric on both sides of the aisle.

The vote was 213-209, with Republicans voting yes, Democrats voting no and six GOP lawmakers voting present.

Schiff, a former intel committee chair, was censured over comments he made years ago during investigations into former President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which interfered in the 2016 election to aid Trump, special counsel Robert Mueller found.

The censure resolution rebukes Schiff for what it calls his “misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives.”

Schiff previously called the criticism “nonsense.”

The resolution also directed the House Ethics Committee to investigate Schiff’s actions.

After the vote on Wednesday, members could be heard chanting as Schiff moved toward the well, where he stood as Speaker Kevin McCarthy read the adopted resolution aloud.

The heckling included shouts of “shame! shame!” while McCarthy repeatedly paused until there was quiet, at one point saying he had time to be there all night.

As the speaker read the censure resolution on the floor, the banging of his gavel could barely be heard over Democrats yelling that the move was a “disgrace” and more.

As the vote was called, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said, “It’s pathetic you’re doing this. Pathetic.”

“The House is in disorder,” Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., shouted.

Schiff was surrounded by fellow Democrats in the chamber, many of whom high-fived and embraced him as he walked towards the well. Multiple Democrats said “what about Santos?” — referring to the New York Republican Rep. George Santos who is under criminal and ethics investigation and denies wrongdoing.

From the Republican side, one member yelled out “jacka—-,” referring to his Democratic colleagues.

The House has censured only two other members in the 21st century: former Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.

The vote on Schiff’s censure drew impassioned speeches from both sides before the vote.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., who introduced the resolution, painted the measure as a “clear vote between right and wrong.”

“This is not a partisan act. This is not a conservative-versus-liberal vote. This is a clear vote between right and wrong, and I urge you to do the right thing,” she said.

Luna said “run[ning] away from this opportunity to hold this man accountable” would “betray the people who trusted us and sent us here [to Congress] to do the right thing.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who earlier this week brought forward a resolution that would impeach President Joe Biden, said Schiff was a “crook” who “represents the worst of permanent Washington, using his position of trust to lie to the American people.”

“If Adam Schiff has a shred of human decency left, he would resign from Congress in disgrace. His tombstone should … be one word: ‘Liar,'” she said.

But Schiff shot back that what he called the “false and defamatory resolution” amounted to “petty political payback” in an effort to “censure or fine Trump’s opposition into submission.”

“But I will not yield, not one inch,” Schiff pledged.

He turned the tables on Republicans, arguing they were the ones who deserved to be censured.

“My colleagues, if there is cause for censure in this House — and there is — it should be directed at those in this body who sought to overturn a free and fair election,” he said.

“The question, my Republican colleagues, is not why am I the subject of this false resolution for doing my constitutional duty, but why are you not? Why are you not standing beside me, the subject of a similar rebuke for speaking the truth? Why did you not stand up to Donald Trump? … Will it be said of you that you lacked the courage to stand up to the most immoral, unlawful and unethical president in history, but consoled yourselves by attacking those who did?” he continued.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries denounced what he called a “fake, phony and fraudulent” censure resolution, arguing the rebuke was borne out of Republicans’ lack of policy vision.

“This is a do-nothing Republican-controlled Congress,” he said. “That is why this censure resolution is on the floor today.”

Jeffries, who insisted that Schiff has done nothing wrong, suggested that former President Donald Trump, whom he called the “extreme puppet master,” directed the censure vote.

“When he says, ‘Bend the knee,’ extreme MAGA Republicans say, ‘How high?'” he said.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed Jeffries’ rhetoric, calling the proceedings a “puppet show.”

“The other side has turned this chamber … into a puppet show. And you know what? The puppeteer, Donald Trump, is shining a light on the strings. You look miserable. You look miserable,” she said, addressing Republicans.

The fiery Wednesday afternoon debate follows a similar censure motion failing last week when 20 Republicans joined Democrats in voting to table the resolution. But most of the defecting Republicans flipped to support Luna’s re-introduced resolution on Wednesday after she stripped it of a provision that would have fined Schiff $16 million, a fact that Schiff noted in his floor remarks.

“Try as you might to expel me from Congress or silence me with a $16 million fine, you will not succeed. You might as well make it $160 million,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “You will never deter me from doing my duty.”

Censure “registers the House’s deep disapproval of Member misconduct that, nevertheless, does not meet the threshold for expulsion,” according to the House’s website.

ABC News’ Carly Roman contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision later this month on a case that would decide the future of race-based affirmative action in high education across the country.

The nation’s highest court heard two major cases in October 2022 on affirmative action, one on race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private college, and one from the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public university.

The legal battle over factoring race into admissions in higher education has been ongoing for decades.

The Supreme Court could decide to overrule a 2003 ruling and more than 40 years of precedent upholding affirmative action in higher education, reshaping the college admissions process.

Colleges and universities often want prospective students to submit high school transcripts, standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, personal essays and a list of extracurricular activities when considering admissions, but can have their own application requirements in place.

“Every college and university can have their own application, meaning their own questions, data, fields, etcetera, and then their own process whereby they review application,” Priscilla Rodriguez, the senior vice president of College Board, told ABC News. “So, it is race, ethnicity, that’s also socioeconomic status.”

Harvard, UNC and other schools have considered race as a factor in their admission processes, and that it’s an indispensable tool for creating a diverse campus.

“It’s diversity in every way possible that really does benefit students and create the rich learning environment that colleges really want to be,” Rodriguez said.

Black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American student enrollment has surged since 1976, according to Department of Education data. Despite the gains, however, students of color remain underrepresented on campuses nationwide.

“If the court rules that race must be taken out of the consideration process, I worry that it will remove a valuable way that students who come from underrepresented, or I’ll call it, nontraditional backgrounds, are able to show or let colleges know that there’s a history and a background that they bring to college that may be different than other students,” Rodriguez said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday night in what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address for the long shot Democratic presidential candidate.

He told the crowd that he believes the U.S. government bears some responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a view rejected by America and many Western countries — and said that the “danger of reckless escalation and nuclear brinksmanship” was “real and present.”

The son of former New York senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and scion of one of the country’s most famous political families, the younger Kennedy has garnered widespread attention in recent months because of his bid to beat President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party’s 2024 primary.

In addition to a string of high-profile media appearances, Kennedy has also registered some support in early polls so far: One survey from Quinnipiac University this month showed him at 17% versus Biden at 70%.

Tuesday’s speech adds to Kennedy’s array of policy positions and beliefs.

While his economic and environmental platform broadly align with other Democrats, some of his other views put him at odds with the party and, in the case of his criticism of vaccines, a majority of the scientific and medical community.

Foreign policy

On Tuesday night, Kennedy took direct aim at U.S. foreign policy while laying out his own global vision, calling the war in Ukraine a “creation of a relentless mentality of foreign domination” on the part of the United States and accusing the West — without evidence — of intentionally sabotaging peace talks in the spring of 2022 and, more specifically, claiming the U.S. wants to remove Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin.

“I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion of that nation,” Kennedy told the crowd. “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”

At times, he leaned heavily on the foreign policy legacy of former President John F. Kennedy, telling attendees that nuclear tensions are on the rise today as in the time of his uncle, but that there is an opportunity “to take a radically different path, a path towards peace.”

Kennedy has been a frequent critic of America’s involvement in supporting Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, which he has repeatedly referred to as a “proxy war” that he claims, as he wrote on Twitter this week, is being fought “all for the sake of U.S. (imagined) geopolitical interests.”

“They wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion,” Kennedy tweeted in May, launching into a critique of the Biden administration. “They only pretend to think it was unprovoked. They are lying to us, manufacturing consent for war.”

That view has been broadly rejected by leading politicians on both sides of the aisle as well as America’s military leaders.

“The United States continues to stand with the people of Ukraine, whose enduring courage and solidarity inspires the world,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement last week, adding, “Russia could end [the war] at any time by withdrawing its forces from Ukraine and stopping its brutal attacks against Ukraine’s cities and people.”

The economy

In a June interview on the “Breaking Points” podcast, Kennedy said that his “primary platform” on the economy would be cutting military spending and reinvesting that money into domestic spending and development.

“My primary platform is to cut the costs on the military,” Kennedy said on the show. “Again, what we were told was a peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union. … We were going to cut our military budget from about $600 billion a year to $200 billion a year.”

On his website, Kennedy lists rebuilding industrial infrastructure “ruined by forty years of off-shoring” among his top priorities, alongside “government assistance to the nation’s most vulnerable.”

He expressed hesitation, though, when asked if he would support a federal jobs guarantee or a universal basic income.

“I need to look at those things, you know, and see, and I need to talk to a lot of economists and talk about the ups and downs of those issues,” he said. “You know, I can see a lot of problems with those issues, which I think are obvious to anybody. And it’s a real departure from American free market capitalism. I’d like to try to give this system a chance to work.”

On raising the federal minimum wage, Kennedy said he did not have a specific number in mind but that “people should have a living wage in this country.”

“Thirty-five percent of Americans … are not making enough money to pay for basic human needs, and that means food, transportation and housing,” Kennedy said on the podcast. “And that means those Americans are sitting on the precipice of a cliff, that they’re inches away from, or on top of, becoming homeless.”

He has also expressed support for bolstering unions: “We need to build rebuild unions in this country, because it’s one of the key ways we can counterbalance … the domination of our government by corporate power.”

The environment

An environmental lawyer by trade, Kennedy has positioned environmental policy as a centerpiece of his presidential bid.

“In 100% of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy,” Kennedy told a crowd of supporters when announcing his presidential run in April. “If we want to measure our economy, this is how we ought to be measuring — based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community.”

Kennedy has also promised, if elected, to protect wild lands by curbing logging, oil drilling and mining and containing suburban sprawl.

“We will become a global advocate for rainforest preservation and marine restoration,” his campaign website states. “We will rethink development policies that promised economic growth while ignoring ecological sustainability, and ended up delivering neither.”

Vaccines

In 2005, in a since-debunked story in Rolling Stone and Salon called “Deadly Immunity,” Kennedy falsely asserted a link between childhood vaccines and autism via a mercury-based compound called thimerosal, which the Food and Drug Administration phased out of nearly all vaccines in 2001. The article was amended with five separate corrections before being fully retracted.

Research has repeatedly shown that vaccines and their ingredients, including thimerosal, do not cause autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine CDC-funded or conducted studies have “found no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines” since 2003.

Six years later, Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit that has campaigned against immunizations and other public health measures like water fluoridation.

After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group held rallies to protest temporary restrictions aimed at stemming the spread of the virus.

It was at one of those events where Kennedy, appearing alongside vaccine opponents and others in front of the Lincoln Memorial, compared the restrictions — like those on travel — to Nazi Germany: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

He later apologized for the remark, saying, “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”​​​​His anti-vaccine views gained traction with some during the pandemic. Filings with charity regulators show Children’s Health Defense saw revenues double to $6.8 million in 2020.

Kennedy has also attracted a growing base of support among far-right figures like InfoWars host Alex Jones and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who have spread falsehoods about the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2020 election.

So far, the 69-year-old environmental lawyer has shown no sign of softening his views on the issue, often reposting articles from his nonprofit on Twitter and appearing as a guest on podcasts like “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where last week he falsely claimed that ivermectin, a de-worming drug, was suppressed by the FDA so that specialized COVID-19 vaccines could receive emergency use authorization.

Last week, he tweeted that as president he would “​​hold the agencies and individuals responsible, and we will compensate the vaccine injured.”

Some experts have expressed concern about Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and misleading claims about COVID-19.

Dr. Nick Sawyer, an emergency medicine physician in Sacramento who founded No License for Disinformation, a group of doctors who came together during the pandemic to call on state medical boards to take disciplinary measures against doctors spreading misinformation, previously told ABC News that Kennedy represents “a huge threat.”

“He’s lying to people about critical things that have to do with our nation’s children’s health,” Sawyer said. “The health effects are incredibly dangerous and have already shown to be incredibly damaging.”

Meanwhile, Kennedy has largely shied away from addressing the issue of vaccines on the campaign trail. In his nearly two-hour-long campaign announcement, he made no explicit mention of them and told NBC News in a recent interview that while he’s not leading with the issue, “If anybody wants to talk to me about vaccines, I’ll talk to them.”

The border

On Twitter, Kennedy has billed himself as both in favor of immigration and “closing the border.”

Visiting Yuma, Arizona, in early June, Kennedy called the rate of unauthorized migration “not a good thing for our country” and said it was “unsustainable.”

“This is a humanitarian crisis because of the understanding across the globe that we now have an open border here,” he said in a video. “There are people being drawn here. They’re being abused. There’s all kinds of horrific, terrible, terrible stories.”

At the same time as Kennedy’s visit, the Department of Homeland Security reported on June 6 that unlawful entries along the southern border had decreased 70% from their record highs since the end of Title 42 on May 11.

“America should be a haven of freedom and prosperity, open to law-abiding migrants who will contribute to our society,” Kennedy said in May. “However, immigration must proceed in an orderly, lawful manner.”

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(WASHINGTON) — A newly implemented Biden administration policy is significantly reducing the number of migrants at the southern border who can successfully seek asylum, a Department of Homeland Security official said in a recent court filing.

The policy established a higher standard for asylum eligibility and presumes, with some exceptions, that those who cross the southern border illegally are ineligible if they come from another country without first applying for legal entry there.

DHS officials say the rule is essential for managing the large number of people who might come to the U.S.

From mid-May to mid-June, the number of single adult migrants who passed an initial screening interview for asylum at the border declined from an average of 83% as recently as 2019 to 46% under the new policy, according to the court document, which was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

The vast majority of those migrants interviewed for asylum since May 12 — 88% — were presumed ineligible for asylum while 3% were able to qualify for an exception to the rule and another 8% were able to show that they hadn’t broke any of its requirements.

The tightened restriction was implemented immediately followed the end of fast-track border expulsion protocols under Title 42 of the U.S. code last month.

“I would attribute the lower pass rate to the higher bar set by the rule,” Migration Policy Institute analyst Kathleen Bush-Joseph told ABC News.

Advocates have sharply criticized the change, likening it to policies under former President Donald Trump that sought to cut back on the number of asylum claims. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are trying to block the restrictions in court.

The comments from Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy Blas Nuñez-Neto were filed Friday as part of a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the asylum rule change.

The plaintiffs argue it would “effectively eliminate asylum for nearly all non-Mexican asylum seekers” and would “bar vulnerable people from asylum for reasons wholly unrelated to the strength or urgency of their need for protection under our laws.”

Government officials have pushed back.

“The decline in encounters at the U.S. border … show that the application of consequences as a result of the rule’s implementation is disincentivizing noncitizens from pursuing irregular migration and incentivizing them to use safe and orderly pathways,” Nuñez-Neto wrote in the filing.

Some migrants will be able to challenge the rule and those who are rejected can apply for a lesser form of relief or seek to appeal the decision with an immigration judge, said Bush-Joseph with the Migration Policy Institute.

“There are thousands of people who have likely not received interviews because the administration doesn’t have the capacity to do the interviews for everyone,” she said.

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