In an interview on Monday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said that he would remove some high-profile Democrats from their committee positions if Republicans win back the House in the 2022 midterm elections.
In an interview with conservative news outlet Breitbart, McCarthy specifically called out Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell of California, who serve on the House Intelligence Committee, and Ilhan Omar, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who could be on committee,” the California Republican said. “Never in the history have you had the majority tell the minority who could be on committee.”
All three lawmakers are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and are popular targets among conservative lawmakers and pundits.
The Minority Leader’s comments come at a very fraught and fractious time in the House in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
McCarthy accused Democrats of setting a “new standard” of stripping members of the opposite party of their committee assignments.
In February of last year, the House voted to strip Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her positions on the House Education and Labor Committee and the House Budget Committee for violent and incendiary remarks she made on social media. Eleven Republicans joined every House Democrat to remove Greene from her committee assignments.
In November, the House voted to censure Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments for posting an anime video to Twitter that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and attacking President Joe Biden with a sword. Just two Republicans voted to remove Gosar from the House Oversight and Reform Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee.
Many Democrats have also urged congressional leadership to punish Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert for her islamophobic remarks targeted at Rep. Omar.
Videos of Boebert also included comments joking about Omar being a suicide bomber, saying that she and others in an elevator were safe — since Omar “doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.”
Boebert claimed she then told Omar, who is Muslim, ‘Oh, look, the jihad squad decided to show up for work today.’”
A spokesperson for Omar said at the time that the story was “a fabrication.” Omar said it was a false claim in a separate statement.
Boebert posted an apology to Twitter, writing: “I apologize to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar. I have reached out to her office to speak with her directly. There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction.”
But after Boebert’s apology, an ill-fated phone call reignited tensions, with each lawmaker releasing dueling accounts of the conversation and slamming the other in the process.
In the aftermath of Boebert’s remarks, the House in December voted to pass a bill aimed at monitoring and combating Islamophobia around the world.
“McCarthy is targeting me for 1 reason: I’m effective,” Swalwell wrote on Twitter on Monday. “He wants to carry water (& sort Starbursts) for Trump’s Big Lie & not be called out. He’s projecting onto me b/c he’s incapable of facing down the Ku Klux Klan elements in his caucus. If he thinks he’s silencing me, he’s not.”
In an interview with CNN on Monday, Swalwell accused McCarthy of making this promise “purely for retaliation.”
“He’s targeting me and he’s targeting Schiff and he’s targeting Ms. Omar because we’re effective,” Swalwell told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Not for any other reason.”
“This is the Trumpization of politics,” he added. “He’s doing it purely for retaliation purposes and he’s not even offering a fig leaf as to why he’s doing it.”
