USA TODAY International Edition
Greene disavows social media posts, no apology
GOP lawmaker doesn’t apologize in speech
Ahead of Thursday evening’s House vote to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of committee assignments, the Republican says the incendiary posts “do not represent my values.”
WASHINGTON – The Democraticled House Thursday voted mostly along party lines to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R- Ga., from her two committees after a charged floor debate rife with finger- pointing and threats of repercussions.
The vote was 230- 199 with 11 Republicans joining every Democrat in stripping her from the Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee for a litany of incendiary, conspiratorial and menacing social media posts before she was elected.
The floor debate in a chamber already riven by division and mistrust turned raw as lawmakers took turns arguing not just about Greene’s particular conduct but what it said about House members who demanded – or objected to – her punishment.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D- Md., walked the well of the House floor holding a poster board depicting a since- removed Facebook campaign ad by Greene showing her holding an assault weapon next to photos of three Democratic Reps. Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, part of a group known as part of the “Squad.” The ad read: “Squad’s Worst Nightmare.”
“I urge my colleagues to look at that image and tell me what message you think it sends,” Hoyer said as he addressed his Republican colleagues. “Imagine your faces on this poster.”
Calling it a move by the “cancel culture,” Republicans countered that one party had no right to forcibly remove a member of the other party from committees without bipartisan consent.
“This resolution sets a dangerous new standard that will only deepen division within this House,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “For all their talk about norms and institutions, it’s the Democrats who’ve acted to undermine the people’s House at every turn.”
Faced with the loss of her committee assignments, Greene came to the floor earlier Thursday to disavow some of her incendiary posts on social media in an effort to avoid punishment.
Though she expressed some regret, Greene never apologized during a speech on the House floor.
“During my campaign, I never said any of these things,” she said. “Since I have been elected for Congress. These were words of the past and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values.”
Before joining Congress, Greene had posted videos of her questioning whether the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks ever happened, stalking and taunting a teen survivor of the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and suggesting that space lasers were causing deadly wild-fires in California.
She has said school shootings were staged by Democrats to promote gun laws and that “the stage was being set” to hang former President Barack Obama and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
They were among a trove of inflammatory posts unearthed by news outlets in recent weeks that prompted Thursday’s vote to remove her from the committees.
Several Republicans who spoke condemned Greene’s posts but said she deserved leniency because they were made before she was sworn in. They called the unprecedented move by one party to unseat a member of another nothing but a “partisan power grab” by the Democratic majority more interested in revenge than forgiveness or fairness.
“I would remind them what ( GOP Senate Leader Mitch) McConnell said when Democrats voted to nuke the judicial filibuster: ‘ You’ll regret this. And you may regret this sooner than you might think,’” McCarthy said.
The vote to remove the Georgia freshman from both committees comes the day after Republican leaders opted not to punish her during a contentious closed- door meeting.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats were compelled to act. Pelosi herself was a target. Greene “liked” a comment in January 2019 that said Pelosi should be taken out with a “bullet to the head.” In a video around that time, Greene said Pelosi was “a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” saying it was “a crime punishable by death.”
Sounding at times contrite and combative, Greene said Thursday the media had distorted her record by taking her posts out of context. But she also admitted she naively believed too much of what she read and absorbed on the internet that played into her deep mistrust of the government, including posts on a QAnon site in 2017 disputing allegations that then- president Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
“The problem with that is I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions; questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret,” she said. “Because 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 anything wrong.”
Greene talked about her deep admiration for Trump, her unbridled opposition to abortion and her mistrust of mainstream media. She also called school shootings “absolutely real” and that the 2001 terrorist attacks “absolutely happened.”
“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions; questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene