On Thursday, Feb. 4, the House of Representatives voted to remove Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, 230 to 199. Greene, a first-term representative from Georgia who was on the House Education and Labor Committee and House Budget Committee, has a history of advancing baseless and often anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including 9/11 trutherism and ludicrously claiming that the California wildfires may have been caused by “laser beams” from space, controlled by, among others, the Jewish Rothschild family. In addition, she has also flirted with the idea that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were false flag plots, as well as the Las Vegas massacre, condemnable actions that should have disqualified her from the House Education Committee in the first place.
Eleven Republicans voted against Greene, which marks the second time in recent years that Republicans have joined to strip committee assignments from a sitting member of their party, the other being disgraced former Iowa Rep. Steve King. The Democrats, for their part, still have yet to punish the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists in their midst, nor have they removed California Rep. Eric Swalwell from his place on the House Intelligence Committee after it was revealed that he was the dupe of a suspected spy for the Chinese Communist Party and an unacceptable national security risk.
The majority of Republicans sided with Greene, however. And many blamed this disparity in self-policing for their resistance to punish her, arguing that the vote was a partisan power play more than an ethical curative.
Well, welcome to democratic governance.
The Athenian Greeks, whom we credit for starting this whole silly idea of popular democracy, had similar problems with necessary systemic checks and balances and personal motive and the clear dissonance that can arise therein. In 490 B.C., after their defeat of the Persians at Marathon, the Athenians instituted a political practice in which citizens would vote to banish for the span of 10 years any person who might be a threat to Athens and its democracy. They called this “ostracism,” after ostrakon, the pieces of pottery they used for voting, and it is from this practice that we get the word “ostracize.”
In “Book III” of his Politics, Aristotle explained that democratic states established ostracism in order to act as a check by the populace on the political power of the elite. And it was used frequently in the 480s B.C. to exile the family and supporters of Athens’s previous tyrant, Hippias. While good in theory, the practice was soon exploited by the politically powerful to drive out chief rivals, such as in 443 B.C., when Pericles, the much-lauded hero of democracy, used ostracism to expel his main political antagonist.
Plutarch’s Life of Aristides tells of Athens’s abandonment of the practice in 417 B.C.: “The sentence of ostracism was not a chastisement of base practices, instead it was speciously called a humbling and docking of oppressive prestige and power; but it was really a merciful exorcism of the spirit of jealous hate, which thus vented its malignant desire to injure.”
Stripping Greene of her committee assignments would classify, in Plutarch’s words, as a “chastisement of base practices.” And it was a necessary one, whether supported by some in “the spirit of jealous hate” or not. Now, do Swalwell next.