Republicans faced a reckoning on Wednesday as leaders in the US House of Representatives confronted calls to punish two prominent congresswomen who represent clashing futures for a party with no dominant leader since Donald Trump left the White House.
Those loyal to the former president are demanding Republicans strip Liz Cheney, the No 3 Republican in the House, of her leadership post as punishment for her vote last month to impeach Trump.
At the same time, Republicans are facing mounting calls from Democrats and some moderate Republicans to remove the newly elected congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from her powerful committee assignments because of her history of bigoted and violent commentary on social media.
The Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, met with Greene, a devotee of the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon, who indicated support in the past on social media for executing Democratic politicians , to discuss her committee assignments on Tuesday night.
But the congresswoman apparently refused to resign from those positions.
On Wednesday, the Democratic House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said Democrats were left with no choice but to move forward with a resolution to strip Greene of her assignments.
After a discussion with McCarthy, Hoyer said it was “clear there is no alternative” to holding a vote on the floor of the House, an indication that Republican leadership was not willing to strip Greene of her assignments. The vote was scheduled for Thursday.
Earlier this week, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, assailed Greene’s embrace of what he termed “loony lies and conspiracy theories,” calling her views a “cancer for the Republican party”.
But McCarthy and other leaders have been far more circumspect, aware of her sway among the party’s grassroots – and with Trump, whom she met with earlier this week at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he has been holed up since leaving Washington on 20 January without attending election victor Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The resolution, introduced by Democrats, cites Greene’s “recent conduct”, a reference to her social media posts that include support for an array of conspiracy theories.
Other Democrats have introduced measures to censure Greene on the House floor or expel her from the chamber, an extraordinary step that would require support from dozens of Republicans.
Greene has defended herself on Twitter, claiming that Democrats’ efforts to remove her from the House labor and education committee are an attack on her identity as a “White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner”.
But her appointment to the education committee was particularly problematic after it was revealed that she had wrongly claimed the 2018 deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was a “false flag” event staged by those opposing lax gun rights. She has also publicly harassed a survivor of that massacre in person.
Greene also serves on the House budget committee.
McCarthy, a staunch ally of Trump who voted to overturn the election results in two states based on spurious allegations of voter fraud in the hours after the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January, also faces pressure from members of his own party to reprimand Cheney during a closed-door meeting later on Wednesday.
Cheney, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney and now a Republican representative for the family’s home state of Wyoming, has received support from Republican leaders, including McConnell.
He called her “a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them”. The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent defender of Trump, said Cheney was “one of the strongest and most reliable conservative voices in the Republican party” and called her leadership in the party “invaluable”.
The fates of the two congresswomen underscore the deep internal tensions within the Republican party as it grapples with the aftershocks of Trump’s presidency.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
