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Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) chalked up a big victory on Thursday when Republicans rallied to expel Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from her seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Omar, a frequent critic of Israel and its human rights record, has been a target of Republicans since her arrival on Capitol Hill in 2019, and McCarthy has vowed for years to remove her from the Foreign Affairs panel if Republicans flipped control of the House.
Following through was tougher than he initially thought.
With Republicans controlling just a slim majority in the lower chamber — and a handful of GOP lawmakers balking at the notion that one party would control the other’s committee posts — party leaders had delayed the vote indefinitely. As recently as Wednesday, the resolution appeared to be dead in the water.
Undeterred, McCarthy spoke with each of the holdouts one-by-one — some by phone, some in person in his office — in a methodical effort to alleviate their concerns and flip their votes.
When the bill hit the floor Thursday afternoon, the results of his lobbying became clear: Every GOP lawmaker supported the measure, except for Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), who voted present.
The expulsion prompted accusations from Democrats that Omar, one of just three Muslims in Congress, was targeted as “political revenge” for the two Republicans — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) — who were booted from their committees in the last Congress. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said the move was “blatantly Islamophobic.”
For McCarthy, however, it marked a major triumph, demonstrating that he can unite a restive and discordant conference behind controversial proposals even after he was bruised, just weeks ago, by the humiliating balloting process that nearly denied him the Speaker’s gavel.
