Attorney General Mark Herring has filed a motion to dismiss in State Sen. Amanda Chase’s lawsuit seeking to overturn her censure by the Virginia Senate.
The Senate voted on Jan. 27 to censure the Republican, who is running for the party’s gubernatorial nomination, following Chase’s participation in events surrounding the insurrection at the United States Capitol.
In the brief, Herring argues that “the Senate acted entirely consistently with its own rules when considering and approving the resolution of censure.”
“Plaintiff complains that, absent this litigation, she has ‘no remedy’ for her censure by the body of which she is a member,” Herring wrote in the brief.
“Because censure is fundamentally a political proceeding conducted by a legislative body, plaintiff’s remedy for any alleged wrongs must be a political one rather than ‘a public fight in a court of law.’ As the Supreme Court explained in a similar suit alleging legislative malfeasance, ‘[s]elf-discipline and the voters must be the ultimate reliance for discouraging or correcting [any] abuses.’”
Herring had issued an advisory opinion last month confirming that “[e]ach body of the Virginia General Assembly possesses broad power to discipline and, where it judges appropriate, expel member legislators.”
This was in response to a question about whether the General Assembly had the authority to discipline or expel legislators who may have contributed to the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol.
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