When Congressman Steve King of Iowa lost re-election in the primaries last year, many House Republicans breathed a sigh of relief because his most politically toxic member – the one whose sympathy for white supremacists made him an outcast in the House – was finally expelled from the House. their ranks.
His replacement quickly emerged in Georgia: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The new Republican congresswoman from Georgia arrived at the Capitol in January, known for having an intermittent flirtation with QAnon and a tendency to believe in 9/11 conspiracies and the Sandy Hook shooting. But on Tuesday – less than three weeks after a pro-Trump crowd stormed the US Capitol in search of politicians to kill – CNN’s KFILE revealed that, in the past, Greene had publicly supported social media posts advocating the murder Democratic politicians, including President Nancy Pelosi.
As CNN notes, Greene liked a January 2019 comment that said “a bullet in the head would be faster” to get Pelosi out of power.
Many in the GOP who were relieved to see King leave are now discouraged that they have added someone much more extremist to their ranks – and furious that their leadership did not anticipate this. His kind of extremism has been known to the party leadership for months: after an initial series of racist and Islamophobic comments by Greene were reported by the Politico before his primaries in June, minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), called them “terrible”. But then he did not intervene to prevent her victory and, since then, has welcomed her into the party group.
On Tuesday, McCarthy’s office told Axios that he planned to “have a conversation” with Greene about social media posts. But for many at the GOP conference, this is the least he will have to do. “I remember when people said MTG would be a problem for Steve King,” said a Republican aide to the House, “and it’s starting to become clear that it will be a much bigger problem than that.”
The newly revealed posts were the last straw for Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), who announced Wednesday night that he was filing a motion to remove her from the House.
“Her very presence in office poses a direct threat to elected officials and officials serving in our government,” said Gomez in a statement. “It is with their safety in mind, as well as the safety of institutions and civil servants in our country, that I ask my colleagues in the Chamber to support my resolution to immediately remove Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from this legislative body.”
Some Democrats have already endorsed this move and Gomez is likely to have company to resolve it. On Wednesday afternoon, newcomer Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) tweeted that Greene should either resign or be expelled. “If you don’t understand that calling for the murder of political rivals is a threat to democracy,” he said, “you shouldn’t be allowed to represent him.”
Many Democrats have yet to forgive Greene for her behavior on January 6, when she was filmed without a mask in a secure Capitol room during the attack and ignored an offer for a mask. Four people in the room later tested positive for COVID-19. Greene later said in an interview with British far-right commentator Katie Hopkins that antifa was responsible for the Capitol invasion – another conspiracy theory, which McCarthy himself took to the House to denounce.
The congresswoman’s first real legislative act was to present articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden after he was sworn in – a move that even made many in the Republican Party private grimaces. She was assigned to the House Education and Work Committee and the House Budget Committee, putting her on more favorable ground than King, who spent his final term deprived of his duties on the committee.
Asked on Wednesday during a briefing whether the White House had a comment on whether Greene should be disciplined in any way by its posts on social media, White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied, “We don’t. And I’m not going to talk about it anymore, I think, in this instruction room. “
At a town hall in his district on Wednesday night, after urging his supporters to “resist” while Democrats have the majority and “refuse to hear that you can’t say certain things,” Greene criticized the media for what she described it as a conspiracy to portray her as a “monster”.
“So, to someone like me, they’re going to dig up everything they can to make me look like a monster and a horrible person. And they are
I will report on it over and over, but they will never post on the thousands and thousands of really cool posts on Facebook or Twitter that I made. Bible verses, praising someone, doing something good…. They will always make sure someone like me looks like a monster. And this is wrong. You have to stop. “
A few minutes later, a local reporter who tried to ask Greene a question was expelled. Meredith Aldis, a reporter for the local WRCB TV station, said she and her team were threatened with arrest and escorted out, despite being invited and accredited to the meeting. She said reporters were told they would be expelled if they asked questions, but she told Greene that she was also a “taxpayer” who had a right to speak.
In recent years, Greene – who has made weapons of all shapes and sizes part of his personality – has been a well-known number of groups that advocate gun security. His rallies target groups like Everytown and Moms Demand Action, and his seemingly self-filmed daily-style videos, once posted on his Facebook page, often promote conspiracy theories about some of the most horrific mass shootings in American history. .
His claims that the school shootings from Parkland, FL to Newtown, CT, were false flags, were widely documented by CNN’s KFILE and Media Matters.
On Wednesday morning, Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was murdered in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018, tweeted a video of Green chasing and shouting at David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who became defender of firearms security as he walked to the US Capitol. The footage, from Greene’s own YouTube page and filmed weeks after Hogg’s classmates were shot dead, spread quickly across the Internet.
In the months that followed Parkland, one of the many mass shootings she claimed to have been “fake flags” – that is, staged – Greene posted and liked posts mocking Hogg. All have already been removed, according to CNN KFILE.
In an undated video, Greene, wearing a black hat with a yellow snake wrapped around it and the words “Don’t tread on me,” postulates that the shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 was a leftist plot to end gun rights. Another, removed from its social media but unearthed by Media Matters, is less sinister and more bizarre, targeting Moms Demand Action, an arms security group.
“All these mothers who demand action – mothers who demand action: you need to grow some balls,” she said in March 2018. “And the problem is, you don’t have balls. We need parents. “
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, in a statement on Wednesday called for Greene’s removal.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene should be relegated to Infowars with the other shooters in the school, not walking the halls of Congress,” she said. “His reckless words and actions put the lives of his colleagues, survivors of mass shootings and all Americans at risk. She is dangerous and needs to go now. “