Democrats, and 11 Republicans, voted tonight to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from both her committee assignments for espousing QAnon conspiracies before being elected to Congress – including supporting calls online for Nancy Pelosi’s execution.
The 230-199 vote created the simple majority needed for Greene to get booted from her posts on the Education and Labor Committee and Budget Committee.
Eleven Republicans felt Greene’s comments were too charged not to be addressed.
Among those who voted to remove Greene from her posts were Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Ahead of the vote tonight, Greene dramatically abandoned her QAnon conspiracy theories in a speech to the House of Representatives.
Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, however, claimed Greene’s remarks were anything but an apology.
The Georgia Republican said ‘9/11 absolutely happened,’ and that ‘school shootings are real,’ disclaiming two of the bizarre claims which had made her the focus for opprobrium from Democrats and condemnation from her GOP colleagues.
Hoyer came out guns blazing with a staunch denunciation of Greene – claiming her disavowing a few beliefs in a floor speech earlier in the day was not enough to excuse her touting them online.
And claiming removal from her committees is just the first step in reprimanding her.
‘None of us should take any pleasure in what we must do today,’ Hoyer said ahead of the vote this evening. ‘But to do nothing would be an abdication of our moral responsibility to our colleagues, to the House, to our values, to the truth, and to our country.’
‘The truth is unavoidable,’ he continued. ‘Republicans have yet to offer a clear and unambiguous declaration that political violence is unacceptable and has no place in their ranks.’
‘This vote can be a first step in correcting the error of those who so far have chosen to do nothing,’ Hoyer said of Republicans refusal to take action against Greene from within the Party.
During his remarks, Hoyer walked a poster around the room with an image of a since-deleted tweet from Greene when she was running her congressional campaign in September.
The image showed Greene holding an AR-15 and to her right had black and white inserts of progressive Representatives and ‘squad’ members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The caption read ‘Sqaud’s Worst Nightmare.’
On the other hand, Republicans’ case against removing Greene was aimed sharply at Representative Ilhan Omar’s blatantly anti-Semitic tropes and downplay of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
They claimed in floor remarks Thursday that Democrats are exhibiting a double standard in taking action against Greene but not Omar – or other members of their own party who have made controversial comments both before and after taking their oath of office.
Greene detailed earlier today that she had ‘walked away’ from ‘a mix of truth and lies’ and now simply wanted to serve her country.
‘You see, school shootings are absolutely real, and every child that is lost, those families mourn it,’ Greene said during her floor remarks.
‘I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,’ she continued. ‘I remember that day crying all day long watching it on the news. It’s a tragedy for anyone to say it didn’t happen. So that I definitely want to tell you. I do not believe that it’s fake. I also want to tell you that we’ve got to do better.’
Previously, Greene touted a view that a plane was not hijacked and flown into the Pentagon as part of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
She did not make specific reference to that part of the conspiracy during her time speaking Thursday.
She also was addressing her previous claims that the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings were a ‘staged event’ by firearm regulation activists.
Despite slashing down some of her previous comments and post, Greene did not address some of the other conspiracies she promoted.
In particular she did not renounce a lengthy Facebook post that emerged claiming the California wildfires were not natural and instead manually started by the Rothschild’s, a wealthy Jewish family, by using space lasers.
She also did not make any mention on the House floor today of her subscribing to a belief Hillary Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin cut off a child’s face while she was alive and then organized the killing of a cop who knew about it.
Greene also did not say anything about anti-Semitic tropes she pushed.
But the speech – which came with no apology – seemed like too little and too late to save her: Nancy Pelosi had only just said that Democrats will vote to remove Greene from her committee positions and tore into Republicans for not taking action against her from within the Party.
Greene said she turned to QAnon in 2017 because she felt she wasn’t getting accurate information from the media or government – especially regarding Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.
‘When we elected President Trump and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me, like Russian Collusion, which are conspiracy theories also and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply,’ Greene said of her roots in seeking out an alternate source of information.
‘I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth,’ she continued. ‘So what I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day – use Google. And I stumbled across something, and this is at the end of 2017, called QAnon.’
‘Well these posts were mainly about this Russian collusion information, a lot of it was some of what I would see on the news at night and I got very interested in it. So I posted about it on Facebook, I read about it, I talked about it, I asked questions about it.’
Greene’s short speech went from an admission that she had promoted false claims to an attack on her perceived enemies as she claimed: ‘Big media companies can take teeny, tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that any of you have said, any of us, and can portray us into someone that we’re not, and that is wrong.
‘Cancel culture is a real thing. It is very real. And when big tech companies like Twitter, you can scroll through and see where someone may have retweeted porn, this is a problem.’
Greene says she ‘regrets’ asking questions and talking about QAnon openly.
‘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. Because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of…. And that’s what my district elected me for.’
Greene also said she stopped believing in QAnon when she found out they were mixing facts and lies.
‘Later in 2018 when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it,’ Greene asserted. ‘And I want to tell you any source – and I say this to everyone – any source of information that is a mix of truth and a mix of lies is dangerous no matter what it is saying, what party it is helping, anything or any country it’s about. It’s dangerous. And these are the things that happen on the left and the right. And it is a true problem in our country. So I walked away from those things ‘
Pelosi told reporters during her weekly press briefing, before Greene took to the floor that Republicans should have taken independent actions against their own member.
‘I remain profoundly concerned about House Republicans’ leadership acceptance of extreme conspiracy theorists,’ Pelosi told reporters during her weekly press briefing at the Capitol, calling Greene a ‘threat’.
‘Particularly distributing is their eagerness to reward a QAnon adherent, a 9/11 truther, a harasser of child survivors of school shootings and to give them valued committee positions including – who could imagine that they would put such a person on the Education Committee,’ she continued.
As part of her outlandish comments and social media posts, Greene, before she was elected to Congress, backed a call for Pelosi to be executed.
‘Today the House will vote to remove Representative Greene from her seat on Education and Labor and Budget Committees,’ Pelosi said Thursday.
Pelosi and other Democrats are lashing out at GOP leadership for refusing to take action – instead claiming they appeared to further embrace Greene Wednesday night.
‘It’s just so unfortunate,’ Pelosi said today. ‘You would think that the Republican leadership in the Congress would have some sense of responsibility to this institution.
‘For some reason, they have chosen not to go down that path,’ she continued.