Rep. Ami Bera defends vote to censure fellow Democrat Al Green for heckling Trump

A day after voting to censure fellow Democratic Rep. Al Green for interrupting President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress Tuesday, Sacramento-area Congressman Ami Bera defended the choice.

In an interview with The Sacramento Bee Friday, Bera called Green “a friend” but said the Texas congressman’s Tuesday night heckling was “distracting.”

“The focus really needs to be on Donald Trump, what the Trump administration is doing, what Elon Musk is doing,” Bera said. “Instead, we’ve spent the last four days talking about Al Green and what the Democrats did in the State of the Union.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson had sergeants remove Green from the House floor Tuesday after he stood and shouted in protest of Trump. Other Democratic members walked out of the president’s first address to Congress since winning a second term.

Bera was one of 10 Democrats who voted to censure, or formally rebuke, Green. Rep. Jim Costa of Fresno also joined Republicans in voting for the resolution.

“Our leaders very clearly said, ‘Conduct yourselves in an orderly, dignified manner.’ Al Green chose not to do that. Some of my colleagues chose not to do that,” Bera said, adding that he didn’t think the Democrats’ protests were “effective.”

The censure vote and the differing responses Democratic members made to Trump’s speech signifies a larger fracture within the party over how to move forward after an election in which Democrats lost the White House and both chambers in Congress.

Democrats’ focus

But Bera insists the party has a strategy.

“Everyone’s saying that we don’t,” he said. “That strategy is to make sure the public understands what Donald Trump is doing. That’s the focus here.”

The Elk Grove Democrat recently took on a leadership role for the party’s congressional campaign arm, also known as the DCCC, to help elect Democrats in vulnerable districts.

“We know how many Medicaid recipients exist in every Republican district,” he said. “We’re going to try to get Republicans to understand if they do vote to gut Medicaid, it is going to come back and haunt them.”

He pointed to the Trump administration’s swift moves to cut federal workers, including 80,000 planned layoffs from Veterans Affairs and a budget plan by House Republicans that could cut Medicaid, the government’s health insurance for the poor.

“They’re going to have to own that,” he said. “If they do that, we are going to have to make sure the American public knows it was Donald Trump and the House Republicans that did that.”