A majority’s base-pleasing stunts at the beginning of a new Congress aren’t supposed to require so many resources. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to fulfill his pledge to remove Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee has turned into a tedious operation to lock down the votes. When it comes to banishing a convenient heretic, there is no obstacle that McCarthy won’t overcome.
In the run-up to his speakership, McCarthy said he would boot three Democrats from their presumed committee slots: Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff from the Intelligence Committee, and Omar from Foreign Affairs. The first two were easy. Since Intel is a select committee, the speaker alone has discretion to seat, or not seat, whomever he wants. But Foreign Affairs is a standing committee, the membership of which is first determined by the respective parties and then made official through House floor action. That means the decision whether to remove a member, or seat them in the first place, requires action by the full body.
Though some House Democrats have previously condemned remarks by Omar that they viewed as either insensitive or outright antisemitic (however dubiously)—the ostensible reason behind McCarthy’s move to boot her—no Democrats are expected to vote to remove her from the committee. McCarthy has to remove Omar with Republican votes alone. And as you may recall from that weeklong episode in which McCarthy had to grind through 15 ballots even to become speaker, he doesn’t have much room to spare.
Republicans uncomfortable with the move began to speak out in recent weeks. Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz, who voted against Democratic resolutions in the last Congress to strip Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from their committee assignments, said in a statement that she “will not support this charade again.”
“Speaker McCarthy needs to stop ‘bread and circuses’ in Congress,” she said, “and start governing for a change.”
South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace also said she wouldn’t support the move, for similar reasons. Democrats have been lobbying other fence-sitting Republicans to deny McCarthy the numbers he needs. Those Republicans weren’t just perceived moderates, either. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said on Monday that he was “undecided” on the vote, and even credited Omar for her questioning of neoconservative policies.
“The reason I think a lot of Republicans want to kick Ilhan Omar off of the Foreign Affairs Committee is because they don’t like what she has to say,” Gaetz said.
Well, sure. A lot of Democrats don’t like what she has to say, either. But this move to oust her from Foreign Affairs isn’t really about Omar’s foreign policy views; it’s a continuation of the procedural arms race in the House, and a long-planned response to what happened in the last Congress.
As Gaetz would add in his interview, the reason he was still “undecided,” instead of a straight-up “no,” was because the “Democrats moved the Overton window.” When Democrats made the rare decision in the last Congress, after Jan. 6, to boot Greene and Gosar from their committees for (among other things) liking or sharing content depicting violence against fellow members, Republicans warned that what goes around, comes around. Republicans felt they would have to oust someone as an act of revenge. And Omar—as a left-wing, Muslim, Somali-born refugee and outspoken critic of Israeli government policies—hits all the right buttons in Republicans’ casting call for an antagonist.
“It is politically motivated,” Omar said over the weekend of the move to oust her. “In some cases, it’s motivated by the fact that many of these members don’t believe a Muslim, a refugee, an African should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Gaetz, Spartz, Mace and others had been meeting with McCarthy and members of leadership this week as he tried to secure the votes. By Tuesday, he appeared to be on the verge of success. Spartz, a week after instructing McCarthy to drop the committee removals and “start governing for a change,” had caved, citing the inclusion of a new due-process clause in the legislation that creates “an appeal process for the speaker’s and majority-party removal decisions.”
The clause, however, is a joke. In the resolution to remove Omar, offered by freshman Ohio Rep. Max Miller—a figure of unquestioned moral fiber—here’s what the language says: “Any Member reserves the right to bring a case before the Committee on Ethics as grounds for an appeal to the Speaker of the House for reconsideration of any committee removal decision.”
This process—the removed members can ask the Ethics Committee to ask the speaker to reconsider putting them back on committees that the speaker can’t unilaterally put them on in the first place??—isn’t actually real. Republican leadership staff freely admit so. In an archetypal Capitol Hill episode, Republican leaders offered Spartz this assurance and then ran to the press to talk anonymously about how it doesn’t mean anything. The clause “merely references an existing process and in no way begins an appeal procedure or guarantees her committee seat will be reconsidered,” a senior GOP aide told Politico. “It’s nonbinding and not actionable.”
Nonbinding, not actionable, and effective in locking up the votes. Republicans planned for a procedural vote on Wednesday, with a final vote coming on Thursday. There was only one small, technical hiccup Republicans were awaiting: Omar first had to be formally added to the Foreign Affairs Committee before they could vote to remove her.
That’s not a joke.