House Removes Greene From Committee Assignments

After House Republicans voted against removing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., of her committee assignments on Wednesday, the Democratic-controlled House held a floor vote on Thursday which removed her from her committee assignments on the House Budget Committee and House Committee on Education and Labor.

Greene, a far-right, pro-Trump, first-term congresswoman from Georgia, has come into scrutiny recently for her beliefs in dangerous, baseless conspiracy theories and her support for executing prominent Democrats, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama, prior to being elected into office. She had previously denounced school shootings, such as the one in Parkland, Fla., in 2017, as a “false flag” operation conducted by Democrats as an excuse to enact harder gun control laws, and strongly criticized survivors of that shooting. She suggested that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that a wildfire in California in 2018 was started by a Jew-controlled space laser, that the Clinton family crashed John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane in 1999, and is a strong believer of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that former President Donald Trump is facing a network of enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by Democratic politicians.

Despite constant calls from the Democrats for the House GOP to expel Greene, or at least take her off of the committees she has been assigned to, House Republicans voted in a conference on Wednesday against reprimanding Greene for her past actions.

As a result, House Democrats set up a floor vote which would strip Greene of all her committee assignments, which House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., denounced as a “partisan power grab.”

In House Resolution 72, the House voted 230-199 in favor of removing Greene from all House committees, with just 11 Republicans voting with the Democrats. Of the 11, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who was the most high-ranking Republican to vote in favor of impeaching Trump last month, did not vote to remove Greene.

This vote essentially strips Greene of all her power in influencing legislation, as all pieces of legislation must first pass through the relevant committees before advancing to a full floor vote. Although each party’s leaders has sometimes chosen to remove a member’s committee assignments, such as when McCarthy chose to strip former Rep. Steve King of Iowa’s assignments after he made racist comments, but a majority party has never moved to remove a member’s committee assignments from the opposing party in modern times.

Prior to the vote, Greene said the 9/11 attacks “absolutely happened” and that school shootings were “absolutely real” in a floor speech, but she refused to apologize for the comments and simply said that her prior comments were “words of the past” that “do not represent me.” She also said that if lawmakers were to “crucify” her, it would be a “big problem.”

Although this could create a dangerous precedent where the majority party is allowed to strip a minority member of their community assignments, Pelosi has said that she was not worried.

“None, not at all. Not at all. If any of our members threatened the safety of other members we’d be the first ones to take them off a committee. That’s it,” Pelosi said.

This was despite Republicans introducing their own proposal, in a bid to warn Democrats, to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Omar is the first Somali-American and one of the first Muslims to serve in Congress, and she is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Republicans cited comments that Omar had made, such as the fact that Israel “hypnotized the world” from ignoring their “evil doings,” a comment which Omar has since publicly apologized for making.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman, D-Fla., said of the vote to remove Greene from committees: “We can remove her from the committee because ultimately even though our party leaders and our party process appoints us to committees, the House ultimately confirms those party recommendations, essentially, and so because it’s a House action we’re able to take a House action to remove a member from committee.”

With fringe Republicans having lost a number of perfectly winnable Senate races in recent years, like in Arizona in November and Georgia in January, it seems as though the GOP is still not ready to rid themselves of the right-wing, pro-Trump extremism rhetoric.