With mostly morbid fascination, Democrats have so far watched Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) take increasingly drastic steps to shore up his credentials with his far-right detractors.
He’s installed once-banned Republicans on plum committees, established powerful new committees out of thin air to appease his most conspiratorial-minded members, and handed the keys to the House floor over to the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
This week, however, McCarthy’s internal management strategy reached into the Democratic side of the aisle—sparking not schadenfreude, but seething anger among members of the minority party.
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On Thursday, House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, over unanimous Democratic objection. The stated reason was Omar’s past comments invoking antisemitic tropes and criticisms of the U.S.
But for Republicans, Omar’s comments were largely an excuse to pursue something else: vengeance against Democrats.
In 2021, the House Democratic majority, along with a handful of Republicans, voted to boot Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) from their committee posts.
When Republicans took charge in January, there was immense pressure on McCarthy to not only reinstall Greene and Gosar, but remove some Democrats from their committee assignments, too.
With that group now in the driver’s seat of the McCarthy speakership, it’s unsurprising that he moved swiftly to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, along with Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) from the Intelligence Committee. (Because the Intelligence Committee is a “select committee,” Speaker McCarthy had sole discretion to remove them, whereas he needed a vote from the full House to remove Omar from a “standing committee.”)
While the moves may seem like a disproportionate response to Democrats removing Greene and Gosar, ultimately, even moderate GOP lawmakers accepted the retaliation.
“This is the standard that Speaker Pelosi set,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), “and now the new minority has to live with that.”
What was a little more surprising was how much political capital McCarthy had to invest in the venture.
Several Republican lawmakers were initially opposed to removing Omar from Foreign Affairs, largely over concerns about the precedent it would set going forward. Figuring that defeat—or even delay—on this first test was not an option, McCarthy spent the week working the holdouts, eventually securing fig-leaf language giving members “due process” in committee removal.
Democratic lawmakers took note of how much McCarthy seemed to be working. Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) seemed struck by it.
“The lack of standing that he has within his own conference, that he needs to cater to this most base and just craven impulse, as opposed to using his political capital to try to do things for the country… it’s just a super unimpressive demonstration of a lack of leadership,” Auchincloss said.
Republicans said the vote was important for McCarthy to win. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who publicly struggled with his vote and called Omar a friend, told The Daily Beast it “sets a clear agenda that we will not tolerate that kind of thing.”
While McCarthy notched a win with Thursday’s vote, Burchett’s observation illustrates the tricky, minefield-laden terrain that the Speaker will have to navigate going forward. Given their increasingly combative conference that often delights in offending, GOP leadership will have to be prepared for intense pressure—and allegations of hypocrisy from Democrats—the next time one of their own violates the standard they are trying to lay down.
In fact, Republicans had barely gotten settled into the majority before McCarthy faced a challenging test—in the form of Rep. George Santos (R-NY). The serial fabulist and alleged fraudster arrived on Capitol Hill under a cloud of scandal and under investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies, yet House Republicans seated him on two committees.
The hypocrisy of booting Omar from a committee while welcoming Santos was so glaring that McCarthy seemed forced to act. Following a Monday morning meeting with the Speaker this week, Santos declared on Tuesday he had decided to “recuse” himself from committees—for the time being, at least.
At a press conference following the vote on Omar, McCarthy himself spoke vaguely about establishing a new set of standards for House members.
“I think what we should do is put into the rules that there is a code of conduct here, but I don’t know the definition, exactly what all that’s going to mean,” McCarthy said. “I think that should be clear.”
There is also the matter of the substance of Omar’s comments that provoked the GOP’s removal vote. In 2019, the Minneapolis congresswoman—a Somali-born Muslim woman—argued that Republican support for Israel was motivated by donations from AIPAC, the biggest pro-Israel lobby, tweeting: “it’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”
Though a reference to a song by the rapper Puff Daddy, Omar’s invocation of Jewish influence on politics through money was widely condemned, notably by Democratic leadership. Omar ultimately apologized.
Then, in 2021, Omar tweeted that the “U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban” were all guilty of “unthinkable atrocities,” prompting outrage from Jewish Democrats, among others. She later argued she was not making “a moral comparison” between the entities she mentioned.
These remarks formed the basis of the GOP’s case for removing Omar and were cited by McCarthy himself at his press conference on Thursday.
But rhetoric and conduct from Republican lawmakers, as well as the most recent Republican president, has prompted far more outrage from Jewish groups.
In 2021, Greene and Gosar were removed from their committee positions largely on the basis of their endorsement of violent rhetoric. Greene had liked social media posts calling for violence against Pelosi, while Gosar released an animated video actually depicting him beheading Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY).
But Gosar and Greene each have also trafficked in fairly obvious antisemitism. Both, for instance, appeared at the white nationalist conference run by Nick Fuentes, an extremist activist who has praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust happened. Beyond that, Gosar has met privately with Fuentes and defended him publicly.
Before her election to Congress, meanwhile, Greene blamed wildfires in California on Jews; afterward, she compared President Joe Biden to Hitler and mask-wearing rules in the Capitol to the Holocaust, both of which prompted sharp rebukes. Greene went to the Holocaust museum in Washington and later apologized.
After a brief period as a pariah in the GOP, Greene is now a critical ally of McCarthy and was instrumental to elevating him to the speakership. He rewarded both Greene and Gosar with seats on the powerful House Oversight Committee—a better assignment than what Greene had when she arrived in Congress in 2021.
And Greene’s first act on the Oversight panel—during the committee’s organizational meeting on Tuesday—was to compare the police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis to the “murder” of Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by police while climbing through a broken window into the Speaker’s lobby on Jan. 6.
The point that Greene and Gosar’s antisemitic extremism is going unaddressed is one that did not go unnoticed by Democrats during the debate over Omar on Thursday.
“Don’t tell me this is about a condemnation of antisemitic remarks when you have a member of the Republican caucus who has talked about Jewish space lasers and other tropes and also elevated her to some of the highest committee assignments in this body,” argued Ocasio-Cortez. “This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America.”
As he runs for another White House term and wins support from GOP lawmakers, Trump, meanwhile, had dinner with Fuentes in November. He has also scolded Jewish voters for not supporting him, citing his backing of Israel, even warning the American Jewish community to “get their act together” before “it is too late.”
Republicans say they won’t brook such rhetoric. “If [Trump] said something that's antisemitic, then we need to bust his ass too,” said Burchett.
But McCarthy and most Republicans have been content to sweep such rhetoric under the rug while demanding accountability for Omar’s rhetoric.
Even Democrats who remain offended by the Minnesota Democrat’s comments opposed McCarthy’s push. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a freshman lawmaker from Florida, said “someone with her record of hateful comments does not belong on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”
“My vote was a vote to protect the institution, for democracy, and for preventing the weaponization of committee selection,” Moskowitz said.
With their move, Republicans said they hoped the practice of removing opposition members from committees would end. “I do advocate, at some point, we should go over, shake hands, and say stop doing this,” said Bacon, the Nebraska Republican.
Aside from observing the internal politics of the move, some Democrats couldn’t help but observe how it clashed with what is meant to be a core value of the current conservative movement.
“This is a party that has raised concerns about cancel culture, about the thwarting of a free and open debate in college campuses and places of higher learning, in Congress,” said Auchincloss. “And here they are, basically asking for their own safe space.”
