Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) has hit back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), telling The Daily Beast that the congresswoman was trying to make her look “ghetto.”
Crockett was responding after Greene said at a Thursday night House Oversight Committee meeting that Crockett couldn’t read past her “fake eyelashes.”
“It was absolutely a racist thing,” she told The Daily Beast. “Any woman that knows anything about makeup and getting done up knows that eyelashes are one of those things that kind of come with it… MAGA has been trolling on social media for a while and it’s a way of them basically calling me ghetto and things like that, because of my hair and my lashes and my nails.”
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“It’s almost like, well, we don’t have anything intelligent to counter that with. So instead, we’ll be racist and we’ll attack her and go after her looks. Which, frankly, I am not lacking in my confidence about my looks…. but they do it all the time. So I think this was just a fundraising ploy for her and it’s also just her brand. Her brand is chaos and ignoring the rules,” she said.
Crockett shared that she regularly gets her eyelashes done by a professional.
“I have someone that actually literally put them on so I don’t have to do strips and whatnot… I have a person that comes to me,” she said.
A spokesperson for Greene pushed back on the claim from Crockett that the Georgia Republican’s statement was “racist,” saying the only person who referenced any sort of “color” was Crockett when she made a remark about Greene’s physical appearance and that the reason the committee went off the rails the way it did was because Democrats spent the beginning of the hearing attacking former President Donald Trump.
“The only one who referenced color was Jasmine Crockett, so her claim is absurd,” a spokesperson for Greene told The Daily Beast.
This was in reference to Crockett’s own name-calling when she hurled an insult at Greene by asking Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) if it was appropriate to talk about a member of the committee’s “bleach blond, bad-built butch body” in reference to Greene.
However, even Republicans rounded on Greene, with rabble-rousing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) saying she was embarrassed by what transpired. During the hearing, Boebert was the sole Republican to vote with the Democrats to silence Greene for the remainder of the hearing. (Boebert and Greene famously have bad blood as they jockey for press attention and Trumpworld’s affections.)
“It was embarrassing what was going on,” Boebert told reporters on Friday. “…I couldn’t bring myself to stand in defense of that, I wouldn’t do it for the other side.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was equally unimpressed with what went down.
“It’s not a good look for Congress,” Johnson told reporters at the U.S. Capitol Building.
The Oversight hearing—which was postponed to 8 p.m. so members could attend Donald Trump’s trial in New York—was supposed to be a markup of a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for withholding the recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
But Garland wasn’t the only official facing contempt in the committee room. The hearing devolved into a petty spectacle almost from the get-go.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) referred to Greene as “baby girl” as she shot back a defense. Perhaps the most shocking moment came when Crockett blasted Greene for having a “bleach blond, bad built, butch body.”
Outrage, predictably, ensued. Even Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) seemed to choke on the alliterative jab.
Once the dust settled Friday morning—and members reportedly sobered up after pregaming the hearing with booze—Johnson wasn’t having any of it.
“And as I’ve said a few times this morning, decorum is an important principle to maintain,” he told reporters. “And we’re going to continue to try to advance that principle and we need people on both sides of the aisle to just, I think, just take the emotion out of it.”
“We can have vigorous debate, that’s what this institution is built upon,” he continued. “But you know, we have to treat one another with dignity and respect.”
Johnson has repeatedly—often futilely—urged decorum. The speaker made a big stink about etiquette ahead of the March State of the Union address only for Greene to flout Johnson’s wishes by donning a MAGA cap and interrupting President Joe Biden’s annual speech.
But Democrats in the House took issue with what they consider Johnson drawing a false equivalence between inappropriate GOP provocations and justifiable Democratic clapbacks.
“Here’s the problem with ‘both sidesing’ the chaos that was the Republican Oversight hearing,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on X in response to Johnson’s statement. “Republicans VOTED in cmte to allow the rhetoric that was used against Ms. Crockett last night. Notice that when Dems have the majority, these things don’t happen.”
But as Johnson pleads for civility, what’s happening on the Oversight Committee is not a surprise to those on Capitol Hill. The panel is a perfect storm for chaos as the top partisans from both parties are put in a room to argue a contentious topic during an election year.
“It’s the committee of misfit toys,” is how one senior GOP aide described House Oversight.
