This will be remembered as another inflection point in the steady unraveling of institutional norms on Capitol Hill.
At least Marjorie Taylor Greene won’t have to spend time sitting at the end of the dais during long committee hearings.
House Democrats voted to boot her from her committee assignments in an act that they will surely come to regret, perhaps as soon as January 2023.
If the majority can keep members of the opposition party off of committees based on incendiary comments, it’s not clear why the GOP ever let, say, Maxine Waters serve on any committees when it had control of the chamber, or why it ever will again.
Kicking off Greene will come to be remembered as another inflection point in the steady unraveling of institutional norms on Capitol Hill.
That said, we believe that Republicans should have taken matters into their own hands and denied Greene her committee assignments to draw a line against malicious lunacy in their own ranks.
That Democrats had a gun to his head with their threat to have a floor vote on Greene’s committee assignments probably made it more politically difficult for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to act on his own. He did seek a deal with the Democrats to take her off the House Committee on Education and Labor and the Budget Committee and instead relegate her to the Small Business Committee.
When Democrats didn’t bite, McCarthy again condemned her past comments and wrung an expression of regret from her in an internal GOP meeting earlier in the week that she repeated on the House floor on Thursday. Her statement didn’t ring with sincerity, but it was better than nothing, even if she was immediately holding a combative press conference where she said, “I’m fine with being kicked off committees because it’d be a waste of my time.”
We have, no doubt, not heard the last of her.