House Exiles Marjorie Taylor Greene From Panels,
as Republicans Rally Around Her
Democrats pressed past Republicans’ objections to
remove the Georgia freshman from her two committee posts in a vote without
precedent in the modern Congress.
The House effectively stripped Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, of her influence in Congress by banishing
her from committees that are critical to advancing legislation and conducting
oversight.
By Catie
Edmondson
Feb. 4,
2021
Updated
7:17 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— The House on Thursday exiled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from
congressional committees, blacklisting the first-term Georgian for endorsing
the executions of Democrats and spreading dangerous and bigoted misinformation
even as fellow Republicans rallied around her.
The House
voted 230 to 199 to remove Ms. Greene from the Education and Budget Committees,
with only 11 Republicans joining Democrats to support the move. The action came
after Ms. Greene’s past statements and espousing of QAnon and other conspiracy
theories had pushed her party to a political crossroads.
The vote
effectively stripped Ms. Greene of her influence in Congress by banishing her
from committees critical to advancing legislation and conducting oversight.
Party leaders traditionally control the membership of the panels. While
Democrats and Republicans have occasionally moved to punish their own members
by stripping them of assignments, the majority has never in modern times moved
to do so to a lawmaker in the other party.
In
emotional remarks on the House floor, Ms. Greene expressed regret on Thursday
for her previous comments and disavowed many of her most outlandish and
repugnant statements. She said she believed that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
“absolutely happened” and that school shootings were “absolutely real” after
previously suggesting that aspects of both were staged.
But wearing
a mask emblazoned with the phrase “Free Speech,” Ms. Greene did not apologize
over the course of her roughly eight-minute speech. Instead, she portrayed her
comments as “words of the past” that “do not represent me,” and she warned that
if lawmakers wanted to “crucify” her, it would create a “big problem.”
Democrats
argued that Ms. Greene’s comments — and Republican leaders’ refusal to take
action against her — had required unusual action. In social media posts made
before she was elected, Ms. Greene endorsed executing top Democrats, including
Speaker Nancy Pelosi; suggested a number of school shootings were secretly
perpetrated by government actors; and repeatedly trafficked in anti-Semitic and
Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
“You would
think that the Republican leadership in the Congress would have some sense of
responsibility to this institution,” Ms. Pelosi said. “For some reason, they’ve
chosen not to go down that path.”
Republicans
themselves moved against Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, in 2019
over comments in which he questioned why the term “white supremacist” was
considered offensive, stripping him of his committee assignments.
But they
refused to take similar action against Ms. Greene. The vote on Thursday
presented Republicans with the uncomfortable choice of either appearing to
endorse Ms. Greene’s ugly remarks or breaking with their party — and with
former President Donald J. Trump, who has effusively praised her. Following the
lead of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican,
many argued that although they disapproved of her remarks, they objected to the
precedent Democrats were setting.
“I truly
believe that the majority claiming a new right to be able to exercise a veto
over minority committee assignments will ultimately be dangerous for this
institution,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on
the House Rules Committee. “A change in norms away from an institution built on
mutual consent and toward an institution where the majority holds a veto power
over everything, including committee assignments, is ultimately an institution
that cannot function.”
Ms. Greene
also told the House that she had broken away from QAnon in 2018. “I was allowed
to believe things that weren’t true,” she said, “and I would ask questions
about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.”
However,
that does not square with a series of social media posts she made in 2019,
including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the
head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been
replaced with a body double, an element of QAnon’s fictional story line.
As more
revelations about Ms. Greene’s incendiary comments were made public this week,
it became clear that Mr. McCarthy would have to address them. At the same time,
loyalists to Mr. Trump were agitating to strip Representative Liz Cheney of
Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, of her leadership post as punishment for
voting to impeach him.
The debate
of the fates of the two women became a proxy battle over the party’s identity
and whether it would continue to embrace the former president or reject his
brand of politics.
Ms. Cheney
ultimately held on to her post after a lopsided vote on Wednesday night at a
lengthy closed-door gathering of Republicans. But that vote was taken by secret
ballot, while Thursday’s endorsement of Ms. Greene was a very public affair.
Still, the
episode laid bare deep divisions among Republicans about how to move forward as
a party. In the days leading up to the vote on Ms. Greene, Senator Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky, the most powerful Republican in Washington, had
denounced her statements, which he called “loony lies,” saying such conspiracy theories
were a “cancer” on the party. Several other top Republican senators had joined
him in denouncing Ms. Greene and saying she could not become the face of the
party.
In an
effort to warn Democrats about the move, House Republicans introduced their own
proposal to remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from the
Foreign Affairs Committee, citing comments she made, including that Israel had
“hypnotized the world” from ignoring their “evil doings.” Ms. Omar has publicly
apologized for those comments, which drew charges of anti-Semitism.
“If this is
the new standard, I look forward to continuing out the standard,” Mr. McCarthy
said, adding that Republicans had a “long list” of Democrats they would want to
remove from their committees.
On Wednesday,
after Democrats had announced they would press forward to rebuke Ms. Greene,
Mr. McCarthy issued a lengthy, tortured statement condemning her comments and
saying that they had no place among House Republicans, but arguing that she did
not deserve to be punished for them. He went further on Wednesday night after
Republicans’ contentious, hourslong meeting, telling reporters that Ms. Greene
had privately apologized for her previous remarks and suggesting that it was
time to move on.
“She said
she knew nothing about lasers or all the different things that have been
brought up about her,” Mr. McCarthy said, apparently referring to a Facebook
post Ms. Greene wrote in 2018 suggesting that devastating wildfires in
California had been caused by a space laser controlled by a prominent Jewish
banking family with ties to powerful Democrats.
“If we are
now going to start judging what other members have said before they are members
of Congress, I think it will be a hard time for the Democrats to place anybody
on committee,” he added.
Removal
from committees is usually reserved for lawmakers who are facing indictments or
criminal investigations or who have otherwise broken with their party in a
particularly egregious way, according to Eleanor Neff Powell, a professor of
political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ms. Powell,
who studies Congress and the committee assignment process, said the most
comparable case to Ms. Greene’s situation was when Mr. McCarthy stripped Mr.
King of his committee posts. Mr. King lost a primary battle in 2020 after his
opponent made the congressman’s inability to legislate on committees a central
theme of his campaign.
House
Republicans passed an internal rule in 2018 mandating that lawmakers facing
felony indictments could not serve on committees, a measure that barred two of
their members at the time from their posts, including Duncan D. Hunter of
California, who was ultimately convicted of violating campaign finance laws and
who refused to give up his assignments.
But the
majority party, at least in modern history, has never before leveraged its
power to dictate the minority party’s committee assignments.
“Typically
the party has asked the person to step aside, they’ve taken the vote
themselves, and then the chamber as a whole takes a vote to confirm that
action,” Ms. Powell said.
Mr.
McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday evening that he had offered to remove Ms.
Greene from her two committees and to put her on a panel overseeing small
businesses instead, but Democrats declined the offer, he said, insisting that
Ms. Greene should not sit on any committees.
Democrats,
who have been particularly incensed by Ms. Greene’s previous calls for violence
after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have insisted that Ms. Greene’s conduct
demanded extraordinary measures.
“If anybody
starts threatening the lives of members of Congress on the Democratic side,
we’d be the first to eliminate them from committees,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Catie
Edmondson is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress.
@CatieEdmondson
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