The House voted Thursday to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., From her committee duties as punishment for a laundry list of extreme views and conspiracy theories she advocated prior to taking office.
The vote was held by a margin of 230-199, with 11 Republican members on the side of the Democratic majority. No Democrats voted against the resolution.
The eleven Republicans who voted to remove Greene include: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Rep. Chris Jacobs (NY), Rep. Carlos A. Giménez (FL), Rep. John Katko (NY), Rep. Young Kim (CA.), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (FL), Rep. Fred Upton (MI), Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart and Rep. Chris Smith (NJ) .
It was only hours after Greene stepped on the chamber floor to express regret over some of the marginal views she had spread, including the pro-Trump-QAnon conspiracy. She didn’t offer an apology.
Kevin McCarthy, Chairman of the Minority House, R-Calif., Had hoped to avoid the vote, which forced Republicans to give an opinion on the resolution aimed at condemning Greene’s behavior.
While few, if any, GOP members had openly defended Greene’s most controversial remarks – such as alleged support for the execution of top Democrats – some Republicans had argued against the trial, warning that the Democrats’ efforts to get Greene up would set a dangerous precedent. Other Republicans chose to attack Democrats for refusing to reprimand their own members for making fire testimonies in the past.
However, the Democrats claimed that Greene would be placed in a separate category because of her behavior and that she should be removed from the Budgets Committee and the Education and Labor Committee.
“If a person is encouraged to talk about shooting a member in the head, they should lose the right to serve on a committee,” said executive chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., On Wednesday before his committee approved the resolution to dismiss Greene from the committees.
“If this isn’t the bottom line, I don’t know where the hell the bottom line is,” said McGovern.
Greene had promoted a litany of other radical conspiracies and extreme statements prior to his election. She was reportedly skeptical of the conspiracy theory that a plane failed to hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. She reportedly suggested that some school shootings had occurred and mocked a survivor of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Media also reported that Greene suspected in 2018 that forest fires in California might have been caused by laser beams.
McCarthy spoke to Greene in a closed meeting Tuesday night. He then suggested to the Democrats that the GOP Greene would withdraw its duties as the education committee if it could remain on the budget committee, NBC News reported. Democrats turned down this offer.
“To do nothing would be a renunciation of our moral responsibility to our colleagues, the house, our values, the truth and our country,” said the majority leader of the house, Steny Hoyer, D-Md., Before the final vote on Thursday evening.
“Yesterday the Republican Conference decided not to do anything. So today the House has to do something,” said Hoyer.
Greene claims she recently spoke to Trump and has his support. Trump, who lost his race to President Joe Biden but never officially admitted it, retains overwhelming Republican support even after his supporters’ uprising in the U.S. Capitol, in which five people died.
But other prominent Republicans have been less supportive of Greene. Earlier this week, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Blew Greene’s “crazy lies and conspiracy theories” and called them “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.”
McCarthy said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that he “unequivocally” condemned Greene’s many controversial remarks on “school shootings, political violence and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”.
He criticized the Democrats for sanctioning Greene and accused the majority party of a party political seizure of power.
McCarthy said he told Greene during a meeting Tuesday night that “as members of Congress, we have a responsibility to adhere to a higher standard”.
“Marjorie recognized that in our conversation. I keep her word,” said McCarthy in his statement.
Democrats, meanwhile, seem eager to showcase Greene as the GOP’s figurehead.
McCarthy has decided to make the House Republicans the “party of conspiracy theories and QAnon,” Pelosi said in a statement Wednesday, “and Rep. Greene is in the driver’s seat.”
“I remain deeply concerned about the acceptance of extreme conspiracy theorists by the Republican government,” Pelosi said at a press conference Thursday.
“Particularly troubling is their willingness to reward a QAnon supporter, a 9/11 Truther, a molester of school shootout survivors, for giving them valued committee positions, including – who could imagine them?” Person would join the education committee? “”
