After the House Republican Conference refused to sanction their violence-embracing freshman colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene, House Democrats on Thursday removed her from her two committee assignments. The resolution passed by a 230-199 margin, with 11 Republicans splitting with the majority of their colleagues to join all the Democrats in supporting the measure.
This means Greene will not join the House Budget Committee and the House Education and Labor Committee as originally planned.
Ahead of the final vote, Greene made a floor speech in which she retracted some of her past outrages, ignored others, and lashed back at her enemies. Her wording was not terribly repentant, reports the BBC:
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. “And that is absolutely what I regret.”
But Mrs Greene stopped short of an apology, and cast blame on the media.
“The media is just as guilty as QAnon for promoting lies,” she said.
While retracting endorsements of the QAnon conspiracy theory and claims that 9/11 didn’t happen and school shootings were fake, Greene did not address past remarks urging the violent death of some of her now-colleagues, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or her especially lurid notions about Jewish space lasers and wildfires. Guess that was just too much to be covered in one speech. But she did find time to play victim of “cancel culture.”
Her sorta-kinda mea culpa echoed what she reportedly said at a closed House Republican Conference session last night, when she earned a standing ovation from many of the attendees, as well as their apparent assent for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s decision to oppose any attempt to remove her committee assignments. (He did offer to replace her two tentative committee assignments with one alternative position, a bait-and-switch Democrats did not accept.)
Her refusal to retract of apologize for incitement to violence against Democrats didn’t go over well with the majority in the House, as the Washington Post reported:
[I]nfuriating to Democrats were social media postings she made approving of violence against prominent Democratic politicians including former president Barack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Green did not address those postings in her Thursday remarks.
“I believe in forgiveness but in order to benefit from forgiveness, you’ve got to demonstrate contrition, and she has demonstrated no contrition,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), who added that he saw “a correlation between that type of reckless rhetoric and what we saw on Jan. 6.”
An image Greene posted threatening the progressive House Democratic “Squad” wasn’t forgotten, either:
Some of the Republicans who opposed the measure sanctioning Greene claimed it was simply about preserving the exclusive right of House party leaders to control the committee assignments of their members. But since that right wasn’t exercised — as it was, in 2019, after former congressman Steve King made white-supremacist comments — it’s pretty clear the GOP just doesn’t want to mess with the Trumpiest person in their ranks at a time when memories of the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol are fresh. Still, some threatened vengeance, like Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, who said: “This is not a road to go down. …It won’t end well for either party.”
Despite her limited contrition before the House, Greene probably expressed her true feelings yesterday in remarks to the Washington Examiner about how she’d react to being denied committee assignments:
Fully expecting to lose her committee seats in a House vote tomorrow, Greene told us that she plans to use the free time to boost conservative 2022 candidates and former President Donald Trump’s next venture.
Greene’s Twitter account also showed her excitedly giving updates on the fundraising she’s done on the back of her supposed martyrdom.
All in all, the defense of Greene by the vast majority of her Republican peers means she has made the House GOP protected turf for the most dangerous and exotic of beasts. But she’ll still bear the marks of condemnation in the chamber as a whole.
