WASHINGTON (CU)_The US House of Representatives voted on Thursday (Feb 4), to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from both her committees over inflammatory comments she made before being elected last November.
Despite her claims of regret over her previous views, the freshman Republican took to the House floor wearing a dark mask emblazoned with the words “FREE SPEECH”.
Addressing her colleagues, Greene tried to dissociate herself from her “words of the past”, which included claims that the 9/11 attacks and mass school shootings were staged. However, she did not explicitly apologize for her online remarks on other subjects such as her endorsement of violence against Democrats or claims that Jewish-controlled space rays may have caused wildfires.
She portrayed herself as a victim of corrupt and unethical “big media companies”, as she alleged that news organisations would take “teeny, tiny pieces of words” she had said and portrayed her as someone she is not.
Nevertheless, eleven Republicans joined 219 Democrats in backing Greene’s expulsion from her committees, while 199 GOP lawmakers voted against it.
Greene was on the Budget committee, as well as the Education and Labour committee, and Democrats were particularly aghast about her assignment to the latter, considering her previous remarks of casting doubt on the school shootings in Florida and Connecticut.
Since the removal of a lawmaker from a committee would usually be decided by their party leaders, and there was no apparent precedent for the full House making such a decision, Republicans warned that sanctioning Greene would set a dangerous precedent, where the majority party in the chamber could tell the minority how to allocate its committee seats.
However, Democrats countered that the real danger would be if a member of the chamber made threats against her future colleagues and the House did nothing about it since the party leaders refused to punish one of their own.
