House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said that he’ll strip Democrats Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Ilhan Omar of committee assignments if he’s elected Speaker of the House after the midterm elections this year, according to an interview with Breitbart.
“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who can be on committees,” McCarthy said. “Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on committee.”
So McCarthy said he is simply adopting the same standards, albeit a bit different than the Democrats, who kept Republicans off committees simply for ideological reasons.
#BREAKING: McCarthy says he’ll strip Dems of committee slots if GOP wins House https://t.co/E6VT2JjpMG pic.twitter.com/sqClufD08O
— The Hill (@thehill) January 10, 2022
“If Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the private sector there is no reason why he should be given one to be on Intel or Homeland Security,” McCarthy said. “He will not be serving there.”
Swalwell was targeted by a Chinese spy in a honey-pot sex sting which McCarthy, after being briefed by the FBI, said disqualifies Swalwell from serving on the Intel committee said the NPR.
Democrats stripped Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of his committee assignments last year after he tweeted an “anime video depicting himself assassinating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and attacking President Biden,” said the New York Post.
Similarly GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of committee assignments by Democrats after social media post made by her prior to serving in Congress showed her sympathetic to several conspiracy theories.
“If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong,” Greene told the House about the incident, according to CNBC.
At the same time Democrats who have posted controversial social media messages, such as Rep. Omar and Rep. Maxine Waters, have continued to serve on committees.
Under a Speaker McCarthy, that will change.
