Rep. Al Green was removed from the House chamber Tuesday night after disrupting President Donald Trump's State of the Union address, and now a Republican colleague wants him formally censured for it. Again.

Green, a Democrat from Texas, remained standing and displayed a banner reading "BLACK PEOPLE AREN'T APES!" as Trump entered the chamber to deliver his speech before a joint session of Congress. The House Sergeant at Arms escorted him out.

On Wednesday, Rep. Mike Rulli of Ohio announced on X that he would introduce a censure resolution:

"Al Green is a disgrace to the United States Congress. I am immediately introducing a resolution to censure him for his disgusting outbursts and repeated violations of House Rules."

This is not Green's first performance. It isn't even his second. The man has turned the House floor into his personal protest stage, and Tuesday night's stunt followed a near-identical pattern from last year.

A habit, not a protest

According to Newsmax, Green was previously censured in a 224–198 House vote last year after repeatedly interrupting Trump and brandishing his cane in protest of the administration's immigration policies. That episode also resulted in his removal from the chamber.

So here we are again. Same congressman. Same setting. Same outcome. The only thing that changed was the prop.

There's a word for someone who gets censured by the full House of Representatives and then returns to the same chamber to pull the same kind of disruption: unserious. The State of the Union is a constitutionally significant address to a joint session of Congress. It is not open mic night. Green treats the solemnity of the occasion as a backdrop for his own theatrics, which tells you everything about where his priorities actually sit.

The banner itself was a deliberate provocation designed to generate a very specific media clip. No one in that chamber called Black people apes. The banner responded to a controversy Green wanted to stoke, not one that existed in the room. He manufactured a moment, and the Sergeant at Arms handled it exactly as protocol demands.

Johnson plays it cool

Speaker Mike Johnson, for his part, did not commit to holding a vote on Rulli's censure resolution. His response was measured and characteristically dry:

"Al Green was removed pretty quickly. I don't know if censure is going to be appropriate."

Johnson then offered what might be the sharpest line of the whole episode. Asked whether formal censure was warranted, he noted that the point of a censure is to bring someone to the House floor and bring shame upon them for their actions.

"I think they showed the American people shame already."

He added that he would let his colleagues decide the matter. That's a speaker who understands that sometimes the best punishment is letting the footage speak for itself.

The censure question

Johnson's instinct here is worth considering. Censure carries real procedural weight. It forces a member to stand in the well of the House while the resolution is read aloud. It is designed to be a moment of institutional rebuke.

But Green has already been through that once. He clearly wasn't deterred. A second censure in two years raises a practical question: does it still carry any sting, or does it just hand Green another spotlight?

Rulli's impulse is understandable. There should be consequences for turning a presidential address into a one-man sideshow. House rules exist for a reason, and Green has violated them repeatedly. The institution either enforces its standards or watches them erode.

The counterargument isn't that Green deserves a pass. It's that he wants the attention. Every censure vote becomes a fundraising email, a cable news segment, a chance to play the martyr. Some members of Congress confuse being disciplined with being important.

The deeper pattern

What Green's repeated disruptions reveal is something broader about how a certain wing of the Democratic Party views institutional norms. These are the same people who lecture endlessly about "threats to democracy" and "norms" and the sacred importance of our institutions. Then one of their own turns the House chamber into a protest rally during the most formal address on the congressional calendar, and the response from the left is silence or applause.

Imagine, for a moment, a Republican congressman holding up a banner and refusing to sit during a Democratic president's State of the Union. The word "insurrection" would trend before the Sergeant at Arms reached the aisle.

But Green gets to do this year after year because the disruption serves a narrative his party finds useful. He absorbs the censure. He absorbs the removal. And he comes back. The cycle continues because nothing about it costs him anything within his own coalition.

What comes next

Whether Rulli's resolution reaches the floor depends on leadership's appetite for the fight. Johnson's noncommittal stance suggests he's weighing whether a vote serves the institution or just serves Green's next headline. Both calculations have merit.

What isn't debatable is the underlying principle. The State of the Union belongs to the president and to the nation watching. It does not belong to Al Green. A joint session of Congress is governed by rules, and those rules were broken. Whether the House responds with a formal censure or simply lets Tuesday night's footage do the work, the record is clear.

Al Green has now been removed from the House chamber during a presidential address twice. He has been censured once. And he walked right back in and did it again.

At some point, the question stops being what Congress does about Al Green and starts being what Al Green thinks Congress is for.