Following last year’s midterm election victory, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made clear that he wanted Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, and Ilhan Omar stripped of their committee assignments.
While Swalwell and Schiff seemed destined to get the boot, three Republicans have come to the defense of Omar.
Buck opposes “tit-for-tat” actions
According to the Daily Wire, Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck is now the latest GOP member to express reservations about kicking Omar off of committees.
“I think that we should not engage in this tit-for-tat,” the website quoted Buck as telling NBC News’s Chuck Todd last Friday.
That was a reference to how in 2021, Democrats removed controversial Republicans like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar from the committees they had served on.
“I have a little bit less certainty about Congressman Schiff and Swalwell on Intelligence just because it’s a little bit different than a regular committee,” Buck continued before adding, “But I’m going to think through that and make a decision.”
“Cancel culture”
The Daily Wire noted that South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace has also come to Omar’s defense, telling Fox News, “I think we have to be very careful about what we are as a constitutional republic.”
“I am not a fan of Ilhan Omar. She’s an anti-Semite. She’s a bigot. She’s a racist. She’s a socialist,” Mace went on to declare.
“But that doesn’t mean that we cancel people in this country,” the lawmaker insisted. “Republicans don’t stand for cancel culture. And that’s essentially what this is.”
“There’s so much anti-Semitism in this country. We should be condemning it right and left as we always have, but there’s also the First Amendment right to do that,” Mace stressed.
“We’re all talking about the Twitter files and conservatives being censored, you know, it’s, it’s, it seems pretty hypocritical if you ask me,” she concluded.
Omar cries racism
For her part, Omar has complained that McCarthy’s efforts to strip her committee assignments are simply motivated by racism.
As the only African born, not being on the Africa subcommittee is not just an elimination of a unique voice but an elimination of all the voices that have never been heard on a committee on the continent.
It’s racist, xenophobic and discriminatory.
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 26, 2023
Fox News noted that Omar conveyed a similar message during an interview on Sunday with MSNBC anchor Yasmin Vossoughian, alleging that McCarthy “would be hypocritic” should he “remove, you know, the first African born on subcommittee on Africa on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”