Marjorie Taylor Greene: US House votes to punish Republican

The US House of Representatives has voted to punish a Republican over incendiary remarks she made by expelling her from two committees.

Marjorie Taylor Greene had promoted baseless conspiracy theories and showed support for violence against Democrats.

Eleven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the motion by 230-199.

Before the vote, the new Georgia congresswoman expressed regret for her views, which included claims that school shootings and 9/11 were staged.

• What is QAnon?
• The Republican dilemma, embodied in one politician

Mrs Greene has now been stripped of her two assignments on the education and budget panels.

It is highly unusual for one party to intervene in another party's House committee assignments.

How did she explain her comments?

On Thursday before the vote, Mrs Greene expressed regret for her past comments, but stopped short of an apology.

On the floor of the House, she said her controversial remarks had been made before she ran for office last year.

• She said she had "stopped believing" in QAnon - a conspiracy theory claiming that former President Donald Trump was waging a clandestine war on a Satan-worshipping cabal of child-abusers and cannibals - sometime in 2018 after finding "misinformation, lies and things that weren't true" in the group's posts
• She walked back comments suggesting that school shootings - such as the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook elementary school and the 2018 Parkland shooting - were staged. "School shootings are absolutely real," Mrs Greene said on Thursday
• She retracted a past claim suggesting that no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. "I want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened," she said. "I do not believe that it's fake."

"These were words of the past. These things do not represent me," she said.

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Mrs Greene said she had been "upset about things" happening in the US and did not trust the government when she came upon conspiracy theories online in 2018.

The 46-year-old also sought to pin blame on the media, saying they were "just as guilty as QAnon for promoting lies".

But she did not address a series of past inflammatory remarks:

• In 2019, she claimed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was "guilty of treason" and referred to it as "a crime punishable by death"
• That same year, she heckled a teenage survivor of the Parkland school shooting and called him "a coward"
• She said the 2018 midterm elections ushered in "an Islamic invasion of our government"

The Republican also did not address her continued promotion of debunked claims that former President Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election.

A new cycle of political retribution?

After an afternoon of procedural manoeuvres and debate, a majority of the House of Representatives took the unprecedented step of voting to strip one of its members of her committee assignments because of what it deemed dangerous and toxic speech she made before she was elected.

Republicans warned that sanctioning Marjorie Taylor Greene set a dangerous precedent, where the majority party in the chamber could tell the minority how to allocate its committee seats.

Democrats countered that the real precedent would be if a member of the chamber made threats against her future colleagues - and the House did nothing. Because the Republicans refused to punish one of their own, the majority said they had to step in.

The House has sanctioned the conspiracy-minded Mrs Greene, but it may have started a new cycle of political retribution.

What did Democrats say?

Ahead of the vote, Mrs Pelosi said she was "profoundly concerned" by Republicans accepting "an extreme conspiracy theorist".

Chuy Garcia, of Illinois, said Mrs Greene's floor speech had come across as "premeditated".

"I did not hear remorse and I didn't hear an apology," Mr Garcia said. "It's all about spin and I think she'll probably try to raise a lot of money from it. I think it's disgraceful."

Jimmy Gomez, of California, vowed to press ahead with a resolution to expel Mrs Greene from Congress altogether.

"I'm committed to bringing it up," he told Politico, "and I said that to leadership - that there needs to be a vote sooner rather or later on this."

How did Republicans react?

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy vowed retribution whenever his party next controls the lower chamber of Congress.

Accusing Democrats of a double standard, he referred to the 2019 anti-Semitism furore when Minnesota lawmaker Ilhan Omar implied US politicians only supported Israel because of lobby money, and Mrs Pelosi appeared with her that same month on a magazine cover.

On Wednesday Mr McCarthy condemned Mrs Greene's past remarks, but refused to punish her.

Jim Jordan of Ohio told the floor: "So who's next? Who will the cancel culture attack next?"

He assailed Democrats for stoking unsubstantiated claims that Mr Trump secretly plotted with Russia to win the 2016 election.

"I've heard several times today from the Democrats: conspiracy theory. The Democrats peddled the biggest conspiracy theory of all time - the Russia hoax!"

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