House Democrats on Wednesday scheduled a vote for Thursday on removing Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from the education and budget committees.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) met with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a bid to broker her removal via GOP leadership, but he said McCarthy was unwilling to go far enough.
“I spoke to Leader McCarthy this morning, and it is clear there is no alternative to holding a Floor vote on the resolution to remove Rep. Greene from her committee assignments,” Hoyer said in a statement.
“The Rules Committee will meet this afternoon, and the House will vote on the resolution tomorrow.”
McCarthy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Republican leader met with the just-sworn-in congresswoman Tuesday night to discuss her adherence to a diverse array of conspiracy theories.
Greene has floated the possibility that mass shootings are “false flag” operations by gun control advocates and said it’s possible the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon wasn’t the result of a hijacked airplane. She reportedly “liked” a Facebook post that said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should be executed.
On Wednesday morning, a defiant Greene tweeted that she was being persecuted for reasons unrelated to her belief in controversial theories including the QAnon movement.
“White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner[.] These are the reasons they don’t want me on Ed & Labor. It’s my identity & my values,” she tweeted.
Democrats have used Greene’s controversial remarks to use a broad stroke and accuse Republicans of being too tolerant of fringe political views.
A group of Republican lawmakers tried to push another option during Wednesday’s conference — offering up a proposal to also oust Rep. Ilhan Omar from her committee assignments in the interest of fairness in light of the Minnesota lawmaker’s past controversial remarks about Israel, which she eventually apologized for after they were broadly slammed as anti-Semitic.
The group, consisting of Reps. Brian Babin and Ronny Jackson of Texas, Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, Jody Hice of Georgia and Andy Biggs of Arizona, planned to argue, accord ing to Fox News, that Omar should also be stripped of her committee posts “in light of conduct she has exhibited.”
Omar tweeted after Hoyer’s announcement Wednesday that “Republicans[‘] desperate bad faith ploy to justify bigotry must be defeated. They can not succeed in bullying their way out of accountability. That’s why this vote matters.”
A two-page bill proposed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) says “Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from her committee assignments in light of conduct she has exhibited.”
Most House members are powerless to meaningfully influence legislation, with most major bills negotiated by party leaders and then presented to the rank and file. Committee assignments, however, give lawmakers a perch to question witnesses and attempt to attach amendments to bills that aren’t the result of grand deals.
McCarthy is attempting to reunify House Republicans after a fractured response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He’s urged Republicans to stop sniping at one another in an effort to patch up divisions. Ten House Republicans voted last month to impeach then-President Donald Trump for allegedly inciting the deadly riot. But there are also many members such as Greene who remain loyal to Trump.
Greene on Saturday boasted of receiving a phone call from Trump.
Although Democrats can eject Greene from committees, they probably can’t boot her from Congress altogether. Expulsion from the House requires a two-thirds vote and is considered unlikely.