US House strips Marjorie Taylor Greene of committees

WASHINGTON

The US House of Representatives voted Thursday evening to strip Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments in response to extremist rhetoric she previously espoused.

The 230-199 near party-line vote saw 11 Republicans side with all of the chamber's voting Democrats in demanding her removal due to her past comments supportive of violence against Democrats and other conspiracy theory rhetoric as well as other actions that recently made headlines. All opposition to her removal came from Republican ranks.

The vote came after the House Republican leadership failed to take action against Greene after her past comments and social media activity came to light in recent weeks, prompting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to call the freshman congresswoman's "loony lies" a "cancer" on the Republican Party.

Greene had been an open proponent of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory prior to running for public office. The convoluted theory baselessly charges that a pedophile cabal of Satan-worshiping Democrats is secretly running the world and was waging a war against former US President Donald Trump.

The theory's signature "Q" was spotted on several of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, killing one police officer who attempted to thwart the assault. At least one of the individuals charged with involvement in the riot was a vocal supporter.

Greene also "liked" social media posts calling for violence against Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama.

Beyond that, she endorsed conspiracy theories that the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and mass school shootings were hoaxes and claimed California wildfires in 2018 were caused by a Jewish-controlled space laser.

She also hounded David Hogg, one of the survivors of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, who has become a vocal gun-control proponent, while he visited Congress to lobby for stricter gun control laws.

"If Scott Pederson, the resource officer at Parkland had done his job, then Nikolas Cruz wouldn't have killed anybody at your high school, or at least protected them," she said while chasing Hogg in a recently unearthed 2019 video. She was referring to the student who is accused of gunning down 17 of his classmates.

"Why are you using kids as a barrier? Do you not know how to defend your stance?" she asked of the teenage school shooting survivor

Speaking in her defense ahead of the vote in which she was all but certain to lose her seats on the House Education and Labor, and Budget Committees, Greene did not apologize, instead, saying her remarks were "words of the past" while trying to further distance herself from them.

"These things do not represent me. They do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values," she said on the House floor, further saying she no longer believes in QAnon.