The House voted Thursday to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, hours after the newly elected Republican from Georgia said she regretted her past embrace of conspiracy theories.
The House voted 230-199 to remove Mrs. Greene from the budget and education committees, with 11 Republicans siding with Democrats.
Democrats said the move was a necessary response to ‘counter the violent rhetoric and misinformation that helped foment the U.S. Capitol riot.’ Republicans warned it could spark future retaliation, setting dangerous precedent, where the majority party in the chamber could tell the minority how to allocate its committee seats.
Jimmy Gomez, of California, vowed to press ahead with a resolution to expel Rep. Taylor Greene from Congress altogether.
“I’m committed to bringing it up,” he told Politico, “and I said that to leadership – that there needs to be a vote sooner rather or later on this.”
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy vowed retribution whenever his party next controls the lower chamber of Congress.
Accusing Democrats of a double standard, he referred to the 2019 anti-Semitism charge when Minnesota lawmaker Ilhan Omar implied US politicians only supported Israel because of lobby money, and yet Nancy Pelosi appeared with her that same month on a magazine cover.
Jim Jordan of Ohio told the floor: “So who’s next? Who will the cancel culture attack next?”
He assailed Democrats for stoking unsubstantiated claims that former President Donald Trump secretly plotted with Russia to win the 2016 election.
“I’ve heard several times today from the Democrats: conspiracy theory. The Democrats peddled the biggest conspiracy theory of all time – the Russia hoax!”
On the floor of the House, Taylor Greene said spoke about the controversy.
- She said she had “stopped believing” in many Q-anon related conspiracies sometime in 2018 after finding “misinformation, lies and things that weren’t true” among the group’s posts
- She spoke of school shootings “You see, school shootings are absolutely real. And every child that has lost those families mourn it. I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old in 11th grade, my school was a gun free school zone. And one of my school mates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage and that happened right down the hall from my classroom.”
- And of 9/11, “I also want to tell you, 9/11 absolutely happened. I remember that day, crying all day long and watching it on the news and it’s a tragedy for anyone to say it didn’t happen. And so, that I definitely want to tell you, I do not believe that it’s fake.”
“I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign. I never said any of these things since I have been elected for Congress. These were words of the past and these things do not represent me. They do not represent my district and they do not represent my values.” she said.
The 46-year-old also called out mainstream media: “I also want to tell you that we’ve got to do better. You see, big media companies can take teeny tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that you have said, any of us and can portray us and to someone that we’re not, and that is wrong. Cancel culture is a real thing.”
“I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox news, I may not find the truth.”
She did not discuss other past remarks:
- In 2019, she claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “guilty of treason” and noted it as “a crime punishable by death”
- That same year, she called anti-second amendment spokesman David Hogg “a coward”
- She said the 2018 midterm elections ushered in “an Islamic invasion of our government”
Nor did she claim to reverse her belief that former President Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election.
