House set to vote on booting Rep. Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs panel
The House will vote Thursday on removing Rep. Ilhan Omar from the chamber’s Foreign Affairs Committee over her past anti-Semitic remarks — a move supported by more than 2,000 rabbis who have signed a letter demanding her ouster.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called for ousting the Minnesota Democrat from the panel after he blocked Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from serving on the House Intelligence Committee — making good on a vow from last November if Republicans won a majority of the chamber.
The House Rules Committee voted 9-4 Tuesday night to approve a resolution to remove Omar from the committee after several Republican holdouts signaled their support.
Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) proposed the resolution, which reads: “Omar’s comments have brought dishonor to the House of Representatives.”
“Omar clearly cannot be an objective decision-maker on the Foreign Affairs Committee given her biases against Israel and the Jewish people,” Miller’s resolution said.
The Somali-born Omar, one of two female Muslims in the House, blasted the resolution, saying there is “nothing objectively true” in it.
“It’s all perceived and filled with pretext. Also, if not being objective is a reason to not serve on committees, no one would be on committees. We vote our districts. This censorship really underscores their true intentions,” Omar said Tuesday evening on Twitter, linking to Miller’s resolution.
Omar, 40, once compared Israel to terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban, and said the relationship between the Jewish state and the United States is “all about the Benjamins.”
Omar defended herself Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” by saying she was unfamiliar with “tropes about Jews and money.”
”I certainly did not or was not aware that the word ‘hypnotized’ was a trope. I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money. That has been a very enlightening part of this journey,” she said in the interview.
The Coalition for Jewish Values, representing the rabbis, sent a letter to McCarthy and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) pleading with them to remove Omar from the panel.
“This is not a political matter, but one of moral conscience, and a necessary step to quell the rising tide of antisemitic speech and violence now impacting Jewish communities across America,” coalition president Yoel Schonfeld and managing director Yaakov Menken said in the letter, obtained by the Daily Wire.
The rabbis said the “failure” of Congress to call out Omar’s “bigotry helped create the environment of hate now evident in New York and across the country.”
Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.), the ranking member on the Rules Committee, said the resolution was political payback for Democrats voting to remove Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from their committees in the last Congress.
“This is about vengeance. This is about spite. This is about politics,” McGovern said.
With Post wires
