You can guess who the two were.

NEW: House votes 223-207-1 to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments.

GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger voted w/ Democrats to pass the resolution.

Rep. David Joyce voted present.

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) November 17, 2021

We have to hold Members accountable who incite or glorify violence, who spread and perpetuate dangerous conspiracies. The failure to do so will take us one step closer to this fantasized violence becoming real.⁰⁰To be clear, I’ll be voting yes on the Gosar censure resolution.

— Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger) November 16, 2021

Kevin McCarthy’s team whipped against the vote and in the end were almost totally successful. All they lost were the two de facto conservative independents, Cheney and Kinzinger, and David Joyce, who said later that he didn’t want to pre-judge Gosar since the House Ethics Committee (which he serves on) has yet to address the matter.

Dems won’t say so but I think they treated this as a lifetime achievement award for Gosar. The anime cartoon he posted on Twitter showing a character with his face superimposed on it slaying a character with AOC’s face doesn’t crack the top 10 worst offenses by a guy who helped organize the January 6 “stop the steal” rally and who’s famously cozy with alt-righters. In fact, if he had targeted someone other than AOC in the clip, I wonder if Democrats would have pursued censure at all instead of just groaning and filing it away as an edgelord crank doing what edgelord cranks do.

Ocasio-Cortez didn’t want to let it go, though, as I noted yesterday. Maybe that’s because she relished an opportunity to show off her victimhood or maybe it’s because she really has had it with righty populists trying to earn cred with their fans by taking shots at her. Either way, one gets the sense that she wasn’t prepared to drop it and therefore Pelosi and her leadership team couldn’t drop it either. If they declined to punish Gosar, progressives in the House would have started whispering to reporters that top Democrats don’t take the abuse heaped on women of color in their caucus seriously.

Faced with having to choose between nuking Gosar or being criticized herself as some sort of racist/sexist, Pelosi made the easy choice.

.@SpeakerPelosi says Gosar censure is about workplace harassment and violence against women and that he hasn't apologized.

"As a woman speaker of the house, I want to be clear that these threats target a woman, a woman of color." pic.twitter.com/pyLqGcwYvY

— Megan Mineiro (@meganmineiro) November 17, 2021

In her zeal to show solidarity with Ocasio-Cortez, she and other members of the caucus went so far as to speculate that Gosar may have committed a crime, an idea arguably dumber than the video itself:

Asked if Gosar could be criminally liable for the video he posted, @SpeakerPelosi tells me: “I think threatening the lives of anyone, not just a member of Congress and certainly the president of the United States, should warrant law enforcement attention.”

— Lauren Fox (@FoxReports) November 17, 2021

Wasserman Schultz: “The Supreme Court’s ruled you don’t have the right to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. And the House of Representatives isn’t going to allow you, without consequence, to communicate the physical harm and murder of a colleague.”

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) November 17, 2021

AOC got to speak at length this afternoon and did make one fair point about Gosar and the MAGA wing of the GOP caucus: They’re not serious about their jobs. They don’t care what they say or what effect it has on others because ultimately they’re just performers for the people who watch them on Fox, not legislators. After Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee assignments, she actually celebrated the fact that she’d now have more time to sh*tpost about Democrats. She, Gosar, and their caucus clique are fundamentally trolls whose highest priority is owning the libs, so naturally Gosar wouldn’t think twice about a little anime-style trolling showing him killing an AOC character. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that sh*tposting is his job.

FULL: AOC speaks during House debate to Censure Rep. Gosar: “It is a sad day in which a Member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a Member of Congress is wrong.”pic.twitter.com/ksMhk0R9le

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 17, 2021

Gosar ultimately spoke and, true to form in the Trump era, declined to apologize. But he did say that he meant no harm and wasn’t trying to encourage violence against Ocasio-Cortez, which may or may not be true. It’s hard to know how seriously to take insurrection apologists when they profess peaceful intentions.

WATCH: Complete remarks by Rep. Paul Gosar (@RepGosar) during House debate on his censure.

"I do not espouse violence towards anyone. I never have. It was not my purpose to make anyone upset." pic.twitter.com/a6JI4xxqgt

— CSPAN (@cspan) November 17, 2021

GOP Rep. Peter Meijer was an interesting no vote on the censure resolution. He’s showed unusual courage during his brief time in Congress, voting to impeach Trump in January and then to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress a few weeks ago for not complying with the January 6 committee’s subpoena. Trump recently rewarded him by endorsing his primary challenger next year, a predictable result of Meijer’s votes. Meijer votes his conscience regardless of the electoral consequences. And his conscience told him today that it wouldn’t be fair to lower the boom on Gosar for what was, ultimately, a tasteless joke.

Statement on today’s House Resolution to censure Rep. Paul Gosar. pic.twitter.com/BT85kgWSqR

— Rep. Peter Meijer (@RepMeijer) November 17, 2021

As for McCarthy, I assume he considers this the best possible outcome in a difficult situation. He stood with Gosar, which will not only earn him some populist cred but should keep MAGA types like Greene off his back about punishing the 13 Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill. He’s giving a little something to both sides in hopes of protecting his own leadership position. McCarthy’s calculation is that the likely House Republican majority in 2023 will contain enough MAGA and non-MAGA types that the caucus will be ungovernable if it’s led by someone from either wing, with the other wing feeling unrepresented as a result. The GOP will need someone who’s grudgingly acceptable to both, and that’s what McCarthy aims to be — grudgingly acceptable. “He is straddling the fence,” one House Republican told Politico. “When you straddle the fence, you better hope it’s not a barbed wire fence.”

Here’s Pelosi reading the censure resolution to Gosar after it passed. The Freedom Caucus stood with him in the well of the House in order to share a populist photo op show solidarity with a member’s inalienable right to be a stupid troll on Twitter. Exit quotation from McCarthy: “A new standard will continue to be applied in the future.”

.@SpeakerPelosi: "The House has resolved that Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona be censured…and is hereby removed from the Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Oversight and Reform." pic.twitter.com/YoHGlmeZrU

— CSPAN (@cspan) November 17, 2021