One California Republican voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from House committees
One California Republican joined congressional Democrats in a vote Thursday to strip a Republican member of her committee assignments due to her past support of multiple conspiracy theories, including that the California Camp Fire was started by a space laser.
The statements became a leadership test for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, who struggled for days on how to handle the past statements of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. She said them before she came to Congress and for the first time said she regretted supporting those theories in a speech on the House floor Thursday.
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret,” Greene said. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of doing anything wrong.”
She did not explicitly apologize, but did say “these were words of the past, and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my values and they do not represent my district.”
The vote went ahead, despite her 10-minute speech disavowing the conspiracy theories. Rep. Young Kim was the only California Republican who supported removing Greene from committees in the vote tally. She did not explain her reasoning when asked for comment by McClatchy.
“We cannot judge and should not judge people by what they’ve done before they arrive and we should not tell the minority who they can seat,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told his colleagues in a floor speech.
Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., said Greene’s comments “before she was sworn in as a member of Congress are dangerous and I don’t agree with them. Next year, the people of Northwest Georgia will have an opportunity to hold her accountable for her actions and her words.
“In the meantime,” Steel said, “I’m focusing on delivering results on behalf of our Orange County community.”
But the Democratic majority, along with 11 Republicans, succeeded in removing her. Greene can continue serving in Congress but will be unable to join committees, leaving her with limited congressional power and little sway over writing legislation. The vote to strip Greene of the committees was 230 to 199.
Typically, party leaders handle the committee assignments of their own members. But McCarthy wavered on Greene — after meeting with her he reportedly suggested to Democrats that Republicans would remove her from her post on the Education and Labor Committee, but leave her on the Budget Committee.
Democrats weren’t satisfied with that, and moved ahead with plans for a vote. McCarthy issued a statement Wednesday blaming Democrats for a “partisan power grab” by taking the unprecedented step of voting to remove a member of another political party from committees. He echoed those concerns in a floor speech Thursday.
“They are declaring the majority has veto power over the minority’s selection of committees,” McCarthy said. “Never before in the history of this house has the majority abused its power in this way.”
Hoyer, D-Maryland, reportedly told McCarthy that if Republicans did not remove Greene from both of her committee posts they would do it themselves in a House vote. Democrats followed through on that threat in an official vote Thursday, which stripped Greene of both of her committee seats.
Greene has supported conspiracy theories such as saying the shooting at a Parkland school was a “false flag” operation, meaning it was staged by people advocating more gun control; said QAnon theories that say former President Trump is secretly fighting a worldwide pedophilia ring are “worth listening to;” liked a comment that said leading Democratic officials such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, should be executed; and questioned whether a plane had crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
She also suggested in a November 2018 Facebook post that the Camp Fire was started by “lasers or blue beams of light” from space, orchestrated by a conspiracy of Democrats and companies that included former Gov. Jerry Brown, Pacific Gas and Electric, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband and others. She theorized that Democrats started the fire to make room for the state’s high-speed rail project, a theory that has no basis in reality.
Greene at first did not publicly apologize or disavow the statements, instead saying the coverage of those statements was evidence that the media is trying to “cancel” her for things she said before she was a congresswoman. She says the media and Democrats are targeting her due to her support for former President Donald Trump.
McCarthy said in comments Wednesday night that she had struck a different tone when she spoke to a private meeting of House Republicans.
“I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us — denouncing Q-on (sic), I don’t know if I’m saying it right, I don’t even know what it is, anything from the shootings, she said she knew nothing about lasers or all the different things that have been brought up about her,” McCarthy said. He denounced QAnon in public remarks in August 2020, pronouncing it right at the time.
Greene’s speech Thursday was more similar to that tone. She still spoke on “cancel culture,” but said school shootings and 9/11 are “absolutely real.”
“Later, in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true, in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing them. ... And I want to tell you, any source of information that is a mix of lies and a mix of truth, is dangerous, no matter what it is saying , what party it is helping, anything and any country it is about, it is dangerous,” Greene said. “And these are things that happen on the left and the right. So I walked away from those things.”
Issa told colleagues in his speech, “We have not and should not in fact hold people responsible for actions before the people of their home state elected them and their secretary of state certified them and they came here,” he said. “In so doing we could pick a plethora of people not to seat or give committees to.”
Beware of the precedent that’s being sent, Issa said. “You may shame us, you may disparage us if we give somebody a committee assignment but that is part of free speech,” he said.
This story was originally published February 4, 2021 at 7:25 PM with the headline "One California Republican voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from House committees."
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