The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to remove Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, from her committee assignments, and Alabama Congressman Jerry Carl voted against removing Greene from her committee assignments.
“While my colleagues and I may not always agree on every issue, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected by her constituents to represent them, and they alone have the right to determine if she should continue representing them in Congress,” Carl said. “The Democrats, who have not removed Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee even after he became compromised by Chinese spies, are attempting to distract the American people from their attempts to push a radical left agenda through Congress. We should instead be focused on getting Americans back to work, getting our children back in school, providing vaccines to folks who want them, and ultimately defeating the Coronavirus pandemic.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, refused to take action against her for promoting misinformation. As minority leader, he could have simply taken away her committee assignments. Democrats responded by putting her fate to a vote of the full House. Eleven Republicans voted with Democrats to remove Greene from the education and budget committees by a 230 to 199 vote.
Greene defended herself on the House floor, disavowing her previous views as ideas she experimented with in her younger days.
Suggesting that the 2020 election was rigged was mild by Greene’s standards. She had also suggested that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center had been detonated and that the government was covering it up. She also suggested that the Obama administration had staged school shootings in order to advance his anti-gun agenda, even going so far last month of telling a Sandy Hook survivor that he was a paid actor. She has also suggested that a laser in space controlled by Jewish people was intentionally starting the California wildfires. Perhaps most upsetting to House Democrats was her liking of posts on Facebook suggesting that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, and other Democrats should be executed for their alleged crimes.
“These were words of the past, and these things … do not represent my values,” Greene told House members. “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 did acknowledge Thursday that school shootings and the Sept. 11 attacks were real events and not “false flag” operations by the government to gain power. Some Republicans warned that Thursday’s vote against Greene sets a dangerous precedent that Democrats may regret when they regain the majority.
Carl represents Alabama’s 1st Congressional District.
