House Democrats advanced a measure to strip freshman Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her two committee assignments.
The move came after Republicans refused a demand from Democratic leadership to take her off the Budget Committee and the Education panel.
“We would have hoped that the Republican leadership would have dealt with this, but, for whatever reason, they don’t want to deal with it. So we are taking this step,” Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Wednesday.
The House will vote on the measure Thursday, and it is expected to pass with the support of the Democratic majority.
Republicans said they opposed the move because it sets a precedent that could result in partisan warfare, with the GOP retaliating against Democrats in the future when they regain the majority.
In the Rules Committee, where lawmakers debated the resolution Wednesday, the top Republican on the panel said the matter should be left to the bipartisan ethics committee, an evenly split panel that scrutinizes whether lawmakers have violated the code of conduct in the House.
“Doing anything different would be sending the institution down a precarious path, and the end of which we cannot predict,” Rules ranking member Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said.
Earlier Wednesday, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer rejected efforts by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to find a compromise that would allow Greene, of Georgia, to keep her Budget Committee assignment.
Democrats said there is no room for compromise due to Greene’s support of conspiracy theories that claim school shootings were “false flag” events and other statements Democrats said promoted violence, including allusions to the assassination of Democratic lawmakers.
“Anybody who advocates assassinations of members of Congress, or anybody who has said what she has said about a whole range of things that we’ve heard here today, I don’t believe should enjoy the privilege of being on those committees,” McGovern said.
Republicans argued Democrats were employing a double standard and never sought to rebuke anti-Semitic or incendiary language from their own party lawmakers.
Democrats said there is no comparison to Greene, who provoked outrage over her comments suggesting mass shootings were staged.
