House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met privately with fellow Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to discuss her litany of controversial political positions as Democrats ramp up pressure to remove her from her committee assignment and the GOP seeks to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in a tit-for-tat effort from her committees.
The meeting between McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Greene (R-Ga.) on Tuesday night lasted about 90 minutes and was held in his office in the Capitol.
The No. 2 GOP lawmaker subsequently summoned members of the House Republican Steering Committee to discuss the matter at a late-night meeting. The Steering Committee assigns strong committees to fellow party members and is in itself a highly influential panel to sit on.
Greene did not comment specifically on the meeting but appeared to recognise it in a Twitter post that included a screenshot of the meeting’s report. The fringe-right lawmaker slammed Democrats in a series of tweets and claimed that McCarthy would never be able to make enough concessions for the opposing party.
One choice would be to condemn QAnon and publicly apologise for publicly promoting theories of conspiracy and encouraging calls for violence against Democrats. Another, allegedly proposed by McCarthy, would be for Greene to withdraw herself from the commission.
The third choice would be for Greene to do nothing, and risk being eliminated by both the education panel and the House Budget Committee, which she also represents, by a vote on the House floor.
There is substantial GOP appetite to exclude Greene from her committee assignments, despite Democrats controlling the House.
According to Politico, during their late-night meeting, McCarthy told members of the Steering Committee that he would try to negotiate a compromise with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to prevent a Greene floor vote.
If Democrats backed off their plans to vote to withdraw her from both committees, the top House Republican said he would offer to pull the freshman lawmaker from the Education and Labor Committee.
A decision on the topic of Greene’s assignments has not been made, but GOP legislators on the Steering Committee will meet again Wednesday to discuss it further.
In the meantime, during Wednesday’s conference, a group of Republican lawmakers plan to bring up another option, offering a proposal to also oust Omar from her committee assignments in the interest of fairness in light of the previous controversial remarks of the Minnesota lawmaker about Israel, which she eventually apologised for after they were broadly slammed as anti-Semitic.
