Today, the US House of Representatives voted 230 to 199 to pass a resolution that removes Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from all committee assignments. Republican leadership had assigned Taylor-Greene to the Budget and Education and Labor committees.
In the final tally, 11 Republicans voted to remove Taylor-Greene from committee assignments. Representative Taylor-Green is controversial for espousing the conspiracy theories associated with the Qanon Movement and other remarks.
In two days of impassioned debate, Democrats especially railed against Taylor-Greene’s assignment to the Education and Labor committee, considering she is noted for saying the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary and Parkland High School and other mass shootings were staged, “false flag” events.
It is well-documented that Taylor-Greene hounded a teen-age Parkland High School mass shooting survivor David Hogg on his way to testify before Congress calling him a coward and liar.
Greene has recommended or implied violence against several members of Congress to include shooting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the head.
In a floor statement today, Taylor-Greene said she regretted her past thinking and statements to include that the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center was staged. She admitted the attack did in fact happen and that mass school shootings were not fake events.
Never before has the majority party in Congress ousted a member of a minority party from committee seats, and Republican representatives warned that the move sets a bad precedent that will come back to bite the Democrats.
Nevada’s Representative for Congressional District 2, Republican Mark Amodei voted against the resolution to remove Taylor-Greene from her committee assignments and released the following statement:
“Any individual who holds public office has a responsibility to be thoughtful with their words and hold themselves to a higher standard. Of course, the ultimate decision makers in determining the appropriateness of an elected official’s statements are the voters of that official’s district.
“Although Congresswoman Greene has previously made many unacceptable statements before being elected to Congress, which quite frankly, would not endear her to me as a constituent, she’s ultimately responsible to the voters of Georgia’s 14th District, because they are the ones who elected her into office 93 days ago to serve as their voice in Washington.
“In the past, when Members of Congress have crossed a line with their rhetoric, their conference colleagues have disciplined them with respect to committee assignments. In fact, Republican leadership has stripped several Members of its own conference from their committee assignments at least four separate times since 2018. It’s also important to note that during the years Paul Ryan or John Boehner served as Speaker of the House, a conversation in terms of Republicans stripping a Democrat from their committee assignments was never entertained – appropriately so.
“For what it’s worth, Speaker Pelosi’s caucus has let multiple accounts of hateful and violent rhetoric slide – inciting violence against a sitting president, referring to a sitting president as a ‘MF-er’, and calling for unrest in the streets… to cite a few.
“In my view, her conference had no problem ignoring a dozen or so past opportunities to maintain a similarly high standard for its own membership.
“While we have certainly learned in the last decade how to tolerate – and at times, appropriately address – idiotic statements from Members of Congress, today, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation where the majority has decided to extinguish the minority’s committee assignments. Not only is the hypocrisy acute, but as a result, the culture of political vengeance metastasizes even further.
“Of course, I will vote no.”
