Marjorie Taylor Greene is an American politician, businesswoman, and a rather controversial figure in recent American politics. She is serving as the U.S representative for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. A member of the Republican party and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, Greene was elected to Congress in November 2020 and sworn into office on January 3rd, 2021.
Miss Greene has promoted QAnon conspiracy theories and has validated violence against Democrats in the past. In 2018, she said that the midterm elections brought in “an Islamic invasion of our government.” In 2019, she harassed a teenage survivor of the Parkland school shooting, David Hogg, and called him “a coward”. In 2018 she suggested the California wildfires were started by a laser beam which was controlled by the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking company. She claimed that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center never happened and it was all staged.
She has largely been unapologetic for her remarks. Asked by a reporter last week Friday whether or not she was “sorry” for some of her remarks, Mrs. Greene said that she was “sorry for saying all those things that were wrong and offensive,” but that “she was not sorry for speaking to David Hogg about gun rights.”
The US House of Representatives last week voted for Mrs. Greene’s expulsion from her two committee assignments namely the budget committee and the education committee over the controversial remarks she made before being elected last November. Eleven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the motion in the House by 230-199. This means that Mrs. Greene cannot take up her place on these committees. This would make her unable to determine policy because most legislation goes through a committee before reaching the House for a vote. Committee positions are a matter of prestige and influence for lawmakers in their party.
The morning after the vote that stripped her of her committee positions, Mrs. Greene said that she woke up “laughing “ at the situation. Hours later at a news conference in Washington Mrs. Greene said that the Democrats had “stripped my district of their voice”. She added that the new Democratic-run government was “tyrannically controlled”. She also had some harsh words for the media saying that the media was “addicting people to hate”.
Before the vote, the House speaker Pelosi said that she was “profoundly concerned” by the Republicans accepting “an extreme conspiracy theorist”. Chuy Garcia of Illinois who is a Democrat said that Mrs. Greene’s speech on the house floor just before the vote seemed “premeditated” “I did not hear remorse and I did not hear an apology,” Mr. Garcia said. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said that there will be retribution whenever his party controls the House next.
The house may have sanctioned Mrs. Greene but this may have started a dangerous cycle of retribution politics in Washington. Sad!