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

  • 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 the 9/11 terror attack may not have occurred. "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.


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.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55940542





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