Politics

Adam Schiff Is Crying All the Way to the Bank

The California congressman is fundraising off his censure like it’s going out of style.

An image of Rep. Adam Schiff with a black box over his mouth.
Not so silenced! Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

Last week, the House Republican majority finally made good on its pledge to censure California congressman Adam Schiff. It was an act of retaliation for Schiff’s role in investigating Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign ties to Russia and for Schiff’s past statements about the “evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia,” as the resolution put it. The censure vote squeaked by, with 213 Republicans voting in support, and six voting present.

The entire episode was actually a consolation prize for another consolation prize. What far-right House Republicans really wanted was an impeachment vote of Joe Biden; when they couldn’t get that, they set their sights on a censure vote of Schiff, which included a call for an ethics investigation into the congressman and a possible $16 million fine, if he were found to have lied.

It took two attempts, but the final text, stripped of the $16 million fine, narrowly succeeded, making Schiff just the 25th House member ever censured, and just the second since 2010. (In 2021 Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar was censured after he posted an animated video depicting himself killing his Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) After the vote, House Democrats shouted “shame” and “disgrace” at the GOP majority.

Tellingly, House Dems also patted Schiff on the back and cheered him. And Schiff doesn’t seem to be taking it too hard. If anything, the censure vote—especially in its diminished form, which took weeks to accomplish, leading to near round-the-clock coverage on MSNBC—was effectively tailor-made to benefit Schiff’s Senate aspirations in California. He joined the race for the Senate seat that will be vacated by Dianne Feinstein in January. Now he’s campaigning off the censure like it’s going out of style. As Insider reported, Schiff sent nearly 20 fundraising emails referencing the censure vote in the weeks leading up to it, and he hasn’t stopped since.

A vote to censure, though uncommon, is basically meaningless. It’s a public rebuke, but one that comes without any actual consequence. And it’s likely that the subsequent ethics investigation, which the censure vote calls for, will never get off the ground.

“To my Republican colleagues, [who] introduced this resolution, I thank you. You honor me with your enmity,” Schiff said last week. Sounds about right.

In many ways, the censure vote was a cherry on top of what has been a dream scenario for Schiff in advancing his Senate campaign. With Democrats in the minority in the House, there was little for them to do. Earlier this year, Republicans removed Schiff from the Intelligence Committee, also mostly a gesture that has allowed Schiff to make himself the lasting face of the anti-Trump resistance—while having to do little in the way of actual legislating to prove it.

Could House Republicans even be doing this on purpose? Their caucus is fractious, chaotic, and disordered. They can’t agree on almost anything, or get much of anything done. For those reasons, it may be difficult to imagine that they’re also diabolical enough to be elevating a candidate in a hotly contested Democratic primary race.

But there may be some method to the madness: Speaker Kevin McCarthy is from California; he’s the most powerful Republican in the state. The censure measure advanced only with his endorsement, and McCarthy knows full well what’s happening in his home state’s Senate contest. Republicans have an absolute zero chance of competing for the seat outright, but they could possibly push the field to the right.

It’s not uncommon for the parties to play in each other’s primaries, after all. Spending to elevate unelectable, far-right candidates in Republican primaries proved to be one of Democrats’ most successful, if controversial, strategies in the 2022 congressional cycle.

And Schiff, a former member of the center-right Blue Dog caucus, is the most conservative member of the group of contenders for the sought-after seat. Despite some recent gestures at a rebrand, his track record in 11 terms in Congress is out of step with California’s devoutly progressive politics.

Some state Democratic party figures also would much prefer to see a woman and/or a person of color win the role. California made history in the 1990s when it became the first state with two female senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein; it has been a point of pride for California Democrats ever since. Now the possibility of having Adam Schiff become a male senator alongside Alex Padilla, another male senator, has some feeling uneasy, and not just because Schiff is no friend of the left.

Despite it all, Schiff is cruising right along. Recent polling has him uniformly at or near the top of the pile of candidates, and his fundraising haul is astounding. His cash advantage over Rep. Katie Porter, who actually had to spend in her very competitive reelection race in 2022, and Rep. Barbara Lee, who does not share in the fundraising prowess of her competitors, is fearsome. Schiff’s Burbank-area House district is not competitive for Republicans, which has allowed him to save his stockpile for a Senate primary that will shatter records in cost.

Republicans have been coy about the edge they’re giving Schiff with these votes. California Republicans in particular refused to cop to it when asked by Insider’s Bryan Metzger: “You can’t help what people do with fundraising and all of that,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa. “That’s for someone else to worry about,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley.

But it’s likely not lost on McCarthy.

Schiff and McCarthy are unlikely to be allies or pals anytime soon, and McCarthy is not known as a master operator. But there’s no question that the seemingly pointless and toothless stunts he’s overseeing could help move the Democratic-controlled state to the right, even if it’s just a nudge. For the state party, which has been frustrated for years by the conservative representation of Feinstein, who herself is well to the right of her constituents, that would be more than a minor annoyance. That, plus the favor McCarthy could curry with the Trump-supporting base, is more than motivation enough.