House Votes To Remove Marjorie Taylor Greene From Committee Assignments

Ted Johnson
·4 min read
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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia who has a history of beliefs in QAnon conspiracy theories and that mass school shootings were staged, was stripped of her committee assignments Thursday in a vote by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lawmakers voted 230-199 to remove Greene from the committees as a sanction for her incendiary comments. Eleven Republicans joined with Democrats in favor of the resolution.

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Greene has drawn extensive media attention since she was sworn in to Congress, but her views got extra focus last week as news outlets reported on her “likes” of Facebook posts that advocated violence against members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Another video surfaced in which she was shown berating David Hogg, one of the survivors of the Parkland, FL, school shootings. Other postings advanced anti-Semitic and racist tropes.

Republicans, while condemning Greene’s views, argued that the vote was setting a dangerous precedent for the future, in which the majority party could sanction members it did not like.

But Democrats said that the action was necessary because House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) refused to take any action against Greene after meeting with her on Wednesday. He had assigned her to the House Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee.

“The Republican conference chose to do nothing, so today the House should do something,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), contrasting it to the way that the GOP handled the case of Iowa congressman Steve King in 2019. Then, Republican party leaders removed King from committee assignments, after he questioned why white supremacy was considered offensive. King lost a primary challenge last year.

Greene appeared in the House chamber earlier on Thursday to say that she no longer advocates QAnon. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions and talk about them….If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and the comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t accuse me of anything wrong.” She said that she “walked away” from QAnon conspiracy theories and that she believes that “school shootings are absolutely real.” She also said that 9/11 “absolutely happened,” refuting previous comments that seemed to doubt the attack on the Pentagon. She did not, however, specifically address her prior comment that called it the “so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon.” “It’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon,” she said in a 2018 video.

“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.

But several hours later, in his own speech on the floor, Hoyer said that he heard “no apology” from Greene, and that there has been no contrition about “liking” threats of violence against members of Congress.

He also challenged Greene’s notion that her incendiary rhetoric was a thing of the distant past. Hoyer pointed to a poster board showing one of Greene’s social media posts from September, which featured a picture of herself with an assault rifle next to headshots of three liberal Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who are often referred to as “the squad.’ Below the photo was Greene’s line” “Squad’s worst nightmare.”

Hoyer said that it was “indisputable” that the Facebook post was a threat to incite violence.

A number of lawmakers have shared, in great detail, their experiences of being in the House during the January 6 siege and, in the aftermath, their continued concerns over their safety.

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