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Ilhan Omar Speaks as House GOP Ousts Her From Foreign Affairs Panel
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February 2, 2023
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1:55Now PlayingHouse Republicans successfully booted Democrat Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, removing from the panel a Black Muslim woman who GOP lawmakers have blasted for making antisemitic and anti-Israel comments.
The 218-211 party-line vote marks a decisive victory for Speaker Kevin McCarthy who made last-minute deals to keep his fractious caucus together on a controversial vote Democrats criticized as an act of political revenge rooted in racism.
Omar, one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, has long been a target of Republicans who have accused her of using antisemitic tropes, for which she has since apologized, that disqualified her from serving on the panel.
“Words matter, rhetoric matters,” Representative Michael Lawler of New York, a freshman member of the committee, said on the floor. “It leads to harm. And so the congresswoman is being held accountable for her words and for her actions.”
Some other Republicans, however, saw removing her from the committee — one of McCarthy’s first moves as speaker — as unnecessary overreach.
One key Republican holdout, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, decided to vote to oust Omar after McCarthy promised to back a rules change that would require a vote of the Ethics Committee to remove someone from a committee in the future. The rules change requires a vote on the House floor.
McCarthy told reporters he wants to establish a code of conduct for the House and enforce it through committee removals voted on in the Ethics Committee.
Omar’s feuds with former President Donald Trump attracted the spotlight. In 2019, she drew heat for implying that American political support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” She apologized publicly after critics in the chamber — some within her own party — said the comments were antisemitic.
“Is Ilhan Omar perfect? No. None of us are,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said before the vote. “But this is not about accountability. This is about political revenge.”
After the vote, Jeffries said Omar would sit on the Budget Committee to “defend Democratic values against right-wing extremism.”
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