{"id":175492,"date":"2021-02-04T21:54:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-05T02:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/04\/and-marjorie-taylor-greene-has-much-more-free-time\/"},"modified":"2021-02-04T21:54:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-05T02:54:00","slug":"and-marjorie-taylor-greene-has-much-more-free-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/04\/and-marjorie-taylor-greene-has-much-more-free-time\/","title":{"rendered":"And Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Much More Free Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

It would have been nice if the Republicans had dealt with this, but given that she has repeatedly called for the assassination of member of the House, but the Democrats (plus 11 Republicans) had to take action, meaning that Marjorie Taylor Greene will sit on no committees at all<\/a>, the first time since, IIRC, Steve King was removed from his committees by the Republican Caucus after he explicitly supported white nationalism in 2019.  (Before that, the Democrats refused to assign Jim Trafficant after he voted for the Republican Rpeaker of the House in 2001)<\/p>\n

Normally, removal from committees is done by the Congressman’s own party, but Kevin McCarthy is too much of a wimp to do the right thing: <\/p>\n

The 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s past statements and espousing of QAnon and other conspiracy theories had pushed her party to a political crossroads.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cabsolutely happened\u201d and that school shootings were \u201cabsolutely real\u201d after previously suggesting that aspects of both were staged.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Democrats argued that Ms. Greene\u2019s comments \u2014 and Republican leaders\u2019 refusal to take action against her \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Ms. Greene also told the House that she had broken away from QAnon in 2018. \u201cI was allowed to believe things that weren\u2019t true,\u201d she said, \u201cand I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.\u201d <\/p>\n

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<\/a> and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/a> had been replaced with a body double<\/a>, an element of QAnon\u2019s fictional story line.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

But the majority party, at least in modern history, has never before leveraged its power to dictate the minority party\u2019s committee assignments. Democrats, who have been particularly incensed by Ms. Greene\u2019s previous calls for violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have insisted that Ms. Greene\u2019s conduct demanded extraordinary measures.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cIf anybody starts threatening the lives of members of Congress on the Democratic side, we\u2019d be the first to eliminate them from committees,\u201d Ms. Pelosi said. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, when the Republicans regain power in the Congress, I’m sure that they will do this to Muslim members of Congress, claiming that this is a precedent, because acting in profoundly bad faith is their thing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It would have been nice if the Republicans had dealt with this, but given that she has repeatedly called for the assassination of member of the House, but the Democrats (plus 11 Republicans) had to take action, meaning that Marjorie Taylor Greene will sit on no committees at all, the first time since, IIRC, Steve …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[469,447,586,374,373],"class_list":["post-175492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bureaucracy","tag-congress","tag-insurrection","tag-politics","tag-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}