The Republican Party of Texas approved resolutions censuring Rep. Tony Gonzales Friday, according to an announcement, after Gonzales voted outside party lines several times over the last year, including support for same-sex marriage and gun safety laws.
Rep. Tony Gonzales was censured by the Republican Party of Texas Saturday.
Resolutions supporting the censure of Gonzales were approved Saturday by 16 counties within Congressional District 23, according to the Republican Party of Texas, alleging the congressman had violated the party’s principles, including one that suggests families are “founded on the traditional marriage of a natural man and a natural woman.”
The resolutions list grievances against Gonzales for his vote in favor of same-sex marriage and President Joe Biden’s bipartisan gun control bill—proposed after a 2022 mass shooting resulted in the deaths of 19 students and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, located in his district.
Gonzales did not attend the vote and suggested he was unaware of it, according to the Houston Chronicle, noting “we’ll see how that goes.”
A censure allows the state’s Republican Party to prevent funding by the party to Gonzales’ future campaigns—unless required by law—and the congressman is “discouraged” from participating in the 2024 primary, the party added.
Gonzales disagreed with resolutions supporting his censure and argued he has rarely voted outside of party lines. “The reality is, I’ve taken almost 1,400 votes, and the bulk of those have been with the Republican Party,” he said Thursday, according to the Texas Tribune.
Gonzales is not the first Texas Republican to be censured by the party after supporting LGBTQ+ communities. Joe Straus, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, was censured in 2018 after he opposed a bill that would have limited access to bathrooms for transgender people, according to Reuters.
Gonzales was first elected to represent Congressional District 23—stretching across a southwestern section of Texas between Juárex and San Antonio—in 2020. He then won reelection in 2022 with nearly 56% of the vote. Gonzales has split from the Republican Party in the last year, and was the lone House Republican in the state and only one of 14 nationwide to vote in favor of Biden’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, according to the Associated Press.