The US 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.-The New York Times
