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On Thursday, 11 Republicans joined 219 Democrats and voted to strip newly elected Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her two committee appointments. While it’s a nice gesture on the part of 5% of the GOP caucus—symbolically chastising a member of the House who in her social media posts had encouraged lunatics calling for the execution of Speaker Nancy Pelosi—MTG is merely a small metastatic tumor produced by a system-wide cancer that is ravaging the GOP.
Sure, Greene spread racism, lies and conspiracy theories, but that hardly makes her an outlier in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Just because Greene is the loudest and possibly the most dangerous of the new crop of newly elected Republican officials doesn’t mean she’s an aberration. If anything, MTG isn’t a deviation from the norm; she’s more like the median.
And, in fact, in a press conference on Friday, Greene seemed to welcome the stripping of her committee assignments, recognizing what a feeble gesture it was. “Going forward, I’ve been freed,” she said. “I have a lot of free time on my hands, which means I can talk to a whole lot more people all over this country and . . . make connections and build a huge amount of support that I’ve already got started with.” (Earlier, she had tweeted: “I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time.” )
Greene’s punishment wasn’t the first time a toxic Republican was stripped of committee appointments. In 2019, GOP Congressman Steve King, an unapologetic white supremacist, was stripped of his committee appointments after musing to The New York Times that “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
But that was two years ago, and MTG practically makes Steve King look like Abraham Lincoln in comparison. As her now-scrubbed social media accounts have shown, Greene has adopted all the worst tropes of Trumpism: she’s racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic, and she pushes lies about everything from school shootings to Jewish space lasers igniting the California wildfires. (Despite all this insanity, it may have actually been the resurfaced video of her harassing teenage school shooting survivor David Hogg that was a bridge too far.)
