Representative Omar has been in the crosshairs,
mostly figuratively, of the Right for some time.
And they would very much like to kick her off of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Here she is talking about the possibility of that happening.
>> Kevin McCarthy's purely partisan move to strip us from our committee
is not only a political stunt, but also a blow to the integrity of our
democratic institution and threat to our national security.
We are thankful to leader Jeffries and House Democrats and
even some courageous Republicans for standing with us.
>> So, Ilhan Omar, I think, Representative Omar I should say,
is right to point out that most of the Democrats seem to be on board.
We're gonna have to see.
And there are, in fact, some Republicans who have said they are not going to go
forward with trying to strip her of her committee assignment.
This is gonna be happening, by the way, next week, possibly, full House vote.
Taking Representative Omar off of her panels will require a simple majority
vote, but remember the Republicans have a very narrow majority.
And so you only need so many Republicans to cross over,
assuming all the Democrats stay in line, for it to not work.
So we have Victoria Spartz and Nancy Mace, Representatives Spartz and
Mace saying they will not vote to take Representative Omar off of that committee.
We also have lobbying going on behind the scenes for
Representative Brian Fitzpatrick and Representative Chris Smith.
There are also a couple of representatives who said that they are undecided at this
point, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee and David Valadao of California.
If they all signed on or if three of the four of those,
I think, sign on, then the vote would fail.
And presumably, McCarthy would know that ahead of time and
thus wouldn't have the vote at all.
That would be, I think, a great sign of at least a little bit of sanity in the House,
but Francesca, any prediction one week out from that vote?
>> I mean, it's good that people have been working with Representative Omar
are saying that they want to keep working with her.
And look, this is where the rubber hits the road,
they're actually doing real work.
And so for me, as a Republican, and again,
I try to put myself in their position every day, especially a woman,
a female Republican [LAUGH] in Congress, how, why, what, where when.
When you see that a minority in your party effectively held up government for
a week until they got their way, which was, I mean,
honestly just throwing a tantrum when you had business to do,
when you have things to do, and now the Speaker, the leader of your
party is capitulating to that little minority instead of you guys,
it would bother me, it would drive me absolutely insane.
And so I would vote to keep someone like Ilhan Omar on my committee and
not go the way of Kevin McCarthy, i.e., the way of the crazies
in the Freedom Caucus and this minority that wants to be listened to even
though they do not represent the majority of American people and
they don't represent the majority of Republicans.
>> Yeah, look, he wants to be popular.
I mean he just came through a rough time, so he wants to deliver.
Fox News despises Representative Omar for reasons that I think should be obvious,
if you're familiar with American conservatism.
And so they want her to be destroyed.
That's what they want at the very least, that's the ground floor.
>> Yeah.
>> They'd love more than that. But yeah, and if you haven't been
actively following American political news for a number of years,
the reason that they would give, if they had to give a reason and
they don't really have to, they can just say Ilhan Omar, ew, we're gonna
get rid of her, is that they don't like a tweet that she sent four years ago.
I think it was where she criticized the use of money by a lobbying organization.
And I understand if you have a problem with the comment,
if you think that she should have worded it differently considering the long
standing anti Semitic tropes of money and all that.
I also think that we live in a country where money and
politics is almost never talked about and when you do you're attacked.
So I would provide a little bit of cover for more criticism of the immense amount
of bribery that goes on in politics, but that's what it is supposedly about.
Whereas Marjorie Greene was liking tweets calling for
people to shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head.
If you think that those are the same thing, then you're insane.
I'm just gonna say that.
I don't think you should be serving on a committee either.
But that is the actual argument.
I think that that's not really why.
I think that she's a member of the Squad, she's young, she's a woman of color,
she's a Muslim.
I mean, pick an identity reason.
That's why they despise her and want to see her off the committee.
>> That's why she should be on the committee, right?
The fact that her family are immigrants, right?
The fact that she was a refugee.
That is why we need this kind of representation of Representative Omar on
the Foreign Affairs committee, right?
We need to understand the impact of our foreign policy and
the wars that we create and the governments that we support,
how those actually impact real people.
So again, it's hard to take this out of the dog and
pony show of the Republicans and Democrats and who has got the committee positions.
In a democracy that functions, that represents people,
hell yeah, Ilhan Omar on this committee.
There's no one better suited.
>> Yeah.
>> There's no one who understands the impact of US foreign affairs better than
someone like her.
>> Yeah, and thus why they wouldn't want.
They're not interested in the effect of our policy.
>> No.
>> They're not interested in the victims of our policy.
As she pointed out in the extended comments of her speech,
which you can find online, she is the first person ever as a representative
born in Africa on a committee that governs the policy towards that continent.
That seems like a useful thing.
Seems like you'd kind of want that if you saw the people living in that continent to
actually be humans.
And so I can see why that would be divisive.
But anyway, those are the people potentially losing their spots.
We'll see with Representative Omar that is coming up next week, and
obviously tune in as we give you our analysis as that happens.
But let's talk about one other individual.
One representative who is one representative very safe on his committee
is Kevin McCarthy not feeling like he's back, like his arms are bound,
he's got to take him off the committee is George Santos currently serving on two
committees and Adam Schiff who just got taken off of one of his,.
Had some words about that saying, this is a Republican speaker, on Kevin McCarthy,
who was seating a human fraud, allegedly human.
George Santos on committee is a serial fabricator about every part of his
existence.
He's perfectly comfortable with it, which I think is a great point.
Now Kevin McCarthy wants you to believe that he's a responsible overseer of
the Republican party.
And if it turns out that George Santos did anything really serious, and
apparently lying about the Holocaust and 9 11, that doesn't rise to the level,
then he will take it seriously.
He says if for some way, when we go through ethics and he has broken the law,
then we will remove him.
The American public in his district voted for him.
He has a responsibility to uphold what they voted for to work and
have their voice heard.
But at any time, if it rises to a legal level,
we will deal with it then after the Ethics Committee,
which I thoroughly neutered a couple of weeks ago, gets done with him.
I would fact check him.
To be fair, they kind of voted for him.
But they also, when they did that, thought that they were voting for someone with
a successful Wall Street career, who had gone to this long list of schools,
who was a pro volleyball player, who had gone through personal tragedies
involving loss of family in the Holocaust and in 9 11, blah blah blah.
And they probably thought that the person that they were voting for
had never stolen dog cancer money, but Kevin McCarthy is forgetting that.
And again, when Kevin McCarthy says I have no power to remove him from Congress.
I have been explicitly stating for weeks, I know that and I'm not asking you to.
You clearly have the power and
the will to remove people from their committees though.
And you are choosing not to do that because you believe that
Ilhan Omar's religious identification or a tweet from 2018 is
somehow worse than lying about virtually every stated fact about your life.
Francesca, what do you think?
>> I mean, it's just beautiful.
Again, I do think that the fact that they are not taking George Santos off
these committees, that they're not really sidelining him at all.
Honestly, it's a little bit of consistency from the Republicans which are like,
we love liars, liars are amazing, right?
As long as they're lying for the right team, welcome come one come all.
And I kind of feel like George Sanders at this point is an op.
I feel like he was designed to just rub Republicans faces in
their own hypocrisy, he was a drag queen Qatar advance.
Are you kidding me?
And they're still like, you know, listen, if ethics, once ethics is done with them,
I, what can we say?
What can we do?
I don't know.
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant to me.
They are forced to embrace this liar who, again,
maybe represented all these things that they supposedly hate.
I think it makes him very endearing the fact that he was a drag queen and
very cool.
But so yeah, we'll see what happens.
It's silly because he could probably be replaced by a Republican anyway in his
district.
But clearly, they're too shook and
they need all the help they can get with a slim majority in the House.
>> Yeah, well, we'll see.
I hope that they're locally, they are recruiting the best possible candidate to
take him out when he inevitably runs for reelection,
probably under multiple different names for multiple different parties.
And also bear in mind as we go forward, Kevin McCarthy referenced there,
the Ethics Committee.
If they come back with anything on George Santos,
that is an incredibly passive statement, but probably an accurate one.
Because we have no idea if the Ethics Committee is looking into him.
I know what you're thinking, well, there's been complaints filed and
that seems like the responsible thing to do.
Yeah, they have control of it.
They just neutered it.
How do you know?
And let's say it comes out in three months.
So we find out that they hadn't been looking into him.
Was Kevin McCarthy gonna blush on air or something?
Why would they be looking into him at this point?
They have power.
They can do whatever they want and they are.