Washington – The United States 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.
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.
On Thursday before the vote, 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,” Greene said on Thursday
- She retracted a past claim suggesting that no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. “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. (BBC)
