McCarthy 'Knows That What He's Doing to Adam Schiff and Swalwell Is Wrong'
Republican Speaker gets blowback for pushing Democrats off committees
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is under fire for removing two prominent Democratic lawmakers from one key committee, and under fire for trying to oust a third from another top panel.
McCarthy followed through with his previous vow, and pushed Reps Adam Schiff said Eric Swalwell — both fellow Californians to McCarthy — off the House Intelligence Committee.
He also intends to build support to vote to remove Rep Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, from the House foreign affairs panel.
McCarthy's moves are seen as political revenge for the House voting two years ago to remove hard-right Republican Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, and Paul Gosar, of Arizona, for advocating violence against Democrats in separate incidents.
The Democrats in question to lose their committee assignments this year have not been accused of similar wrongdoing.
McCarthy, as speaker, can unilaterally remove Schiff and Swalwell from the intelligence committee but he needs a majority vote to oust Omar from Foreign Affairs.
That could prove difficult, as House Republicans are operating with one of the smallest majorities in modern history, and already some — like Rep Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) — said she will not support McCarthy’s effort to deny Omar her seat.
Spartz also said she opposes McCarthy’s effort to block Schiff and Swalwell from Intelligence.
Spartz pointed to the Democratic-led moves in 2021 to strip Greene and Gosar of their panel assignments — which she voted against — as a reason for her resistance.
“I am very polar opposite, on a lot of views, with Representative Omar on Israel, as I am with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Russia and Ukraine,” she said in an on-camera appearance with CNN host Anderson Cooper. “But I still stood up, last Congress, and defended the lack of due process and what was doing with Marjorie.
“So, I cannot be a hypocrite and say right now that Marjorie Taylor Greene and President Trump didn't have proper due process, but it's okay for Democrats not to have that,” Spartz added. “You ought to have values. If you believe in this constitutional republic, if you believe that the law governs and we don't have kings and queens and we don't have top-down approaches, then you have to stick with that. Otherwise, people will lose credibility, and we'll have a lot of important investigations and people will not trust us.”
McCarthy's efforts at retribution at the trio of Democratic lawmakers isn't genuine, but rather part of the “deal with the devil” he had to strike in order to finally win the speakership, according to one former Republican congressman who once served with the now-speaker.
“Anderson, when I listen to McCarthy there, it just doesn't sound like him. I served with McCarthy. That's not him. I think Kevin McCarthy knows that what he's doing to Adam Schiff and Swalwell is wrong,” Joe Walsh, of Illinois, in an interview with CNN’s Cooper. “But McCarthy has no choice because he won't be speaker if he's not seen as fighting these fights.
“And we make a big mistake, on TV and in the media, when we think that there are only 15 to 20 MAGA extremists in the House Republican Conference,” added Walsh, who today is a regular critic of his former party. “Remember, the vast majority of that conference is now MAGA.
“The vast majority of House Republicans are election deniers or January 6th sympathizers. McCarthy doesn't have just a couple crazies like Lauren Boebert to deal with. It's his whole conference,” Walsh said, referring to the far-right congresswoman from Colorado who helped orchestrate the opposition to McCarthy that kept him from winning the speaker's gavel until the astounding 15th round of balloting earlier this month.
The effected Democrats, themselves, came out to the press Wednesday to criticize their ousters.
“This is someone who, Kevin McCarthy, who owes his allegiance to a party leader in Mar-a-Lago who dines with white nationalists and anti-Semites,” Schiff said of former president Donald Trump, who supported McCarthy in his protracted bid for speaker. “He's putting people on committees who speak at white nationalist rallies. The hypocrisy just grabs you by the throat. But hypocrisy is probably the least of Mr. McCarthy's sins.
“The most significant impact is that he is continuing this destructive trend set by his party leader of tearing down our institutions, of degrading the Congress, and, this new select committee that he is establishing is going to simply just bring greater discredit on the Congress,” Schiff said of a new select committee which has been criticized as nothing more than formalized score-settling against federal institutions which have investigated Trump. “And that’s our paramount concern, is what he’s doing to our institutions.
“In a bitter bargain to get the gavel, to get the speakership, he is slowly undermining each part of the work of this institution and that’s certainly not in the best interests of the country — which expect us to be working to make sure that we confront inflation — that we deal with the economic challenges that we have, that we create an economy that works for everyone. This is what our focus should be on, not on what the lowest common denominator in the Republican conference wants,” Schiff said.
Omar pointed out why she and her colleagues have been specifically targeted.
“I think it is really important in all of our cases to remember it is not the accusations that McCarthy is making against us, that is pushing for our removal from these committees. It is about revenge. It’s about the appeasing the former president,” she said. “All three of us have been a thorn in the back of the previous disgraced president.
“Republicans have been gunning for our seats, and obviously know how effective we have been in upholding the Constitution, in defending our democracy, in standing up to extremists. And we will continue to do that work, regardless of whether we are seated on these committees or not,” Omar added.
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