In the midst of a combative congressional turnover, House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been catapulted into the spotlight following a controversial campaign. Greene ran unopposed for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District after Kevin Van Ausdal, her Democratic opponent, unofficially dropped out of the race on Sep. 11, 2020 due to personal conflicts surrounding his separation from his wife.

 

Throughout her campaign, Greene made headlines for contentious statements and tweets. Evidence of racism surfaced, including videos where Greene compares the Black Lives Matter movement to organizations like the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan and calls the most diverse House of Representatives in history “an Islamic invasion of our government.”

 

Many have condemned Representative Greene throughout her campaign and first weeks of service in Congress for her support of QAnon. The right-wing source has produced conspiracies such as “Pizzagate,” a disproven theory that Secretary Hillary Clinton ran a child sex-trafficking organization through a pizza parlor, and the assertion that Donald Trump was the true victor of the 2020 presidential election. An avid Trump supporter, Greene has expressed her support of the conspiracies since 2017 when she filmed a video highlighting points from QAnon and endorsing many of the theories.“There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene said in the video.

 

Along with the theories that many prominent Democrats are “Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” Greene has also very prominently supported the “stop the steal” movement, a trending campaign claiming that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election, a thoroughly disproven allegation.

 

“Without the widespread voter fraud, out-of-state voters, mail-in ballots from dead people, and ‘discovery’ of hidden ballots, we all know that President Trump wins our state in a landslide,” Greene wrote in a statement made on Dec. 14, 2020.

 

Recently, a video surfaced showing Representative Greene verbally harassing Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor, David Hogg. Hogg, a former student of the high school, became a prominent figure in the subsequent movement calling for gun control legislation,  March for Our Lives. Greene has stated that she believes the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida was a “false flag” event, meaning it was arranged by some unknown entity and set up to blame Nikolas Cruz, now 22, a former MSD student who was expelled after disciplinary concerns in 2017.

 

Despite her history with these conspiracies, Greene was placed on the House Education and Labor Committee, as well as the Budget Committee. These assignments sparked outrage among fellow Congresspeople and the American people. House Democrats demanded that Representative Greene be removed from her House committee seats.

 

“Reducing the future harm that she can cause in Congress, and denying her a seat at committee tables where fact-based policies will be drafted, is both a suitable punishment and a proper restraint of her influence,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) –one of the sponsors of the resolution to strip Representative Greene of her committee assignments– said in a press conference.

 

On Feb. 4, 2021, the House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from the House Education and Labor Committee as well as the House Budget Committee in a 230-199 vote. 11 Republican representatives voted to remove Greene. 

 

While Representative Greene has been stripped of her committee seats and may also be censured by a future House vote, some Americans and Congresspeople believe that the House needs to expel the Georgian representative from Congress.

 

“I truly believe that she is a threat to the safety of other members and the institution. So, [expelling Greene] is a big step, but it's something that needs to be done,” Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) said in an opinion piece for NBC News.