The House of Representatives has 435 members, and rest assured that at any one time there are several cranks and fanatics in the ranks of both parties.
But House Democrats want to make a special case of one member. They are pressing to censure or expel Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican from Georgia, for outrageous statements she made before getting elected. Greene has praised the bizarre and toxic QAnon movement, and in a 2018 Facebook post, she alleged that the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family, may have used a laser beam from space to spark a forest fire in order to profit from it.
Democrats should be careful in starting that game. Many of them have said things that could merit removal from their own committee assignments. Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) once wrote that “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” (Omar did apologize for her remark, which was made in 2012.) Her campaign aides are also being investigated for a vote-harvesting operation that allowed non-citizens to vote.
California representative Maxine Waters, who in 2019 urged people to harass Trump administration officials at restaurants or gas stations, now chairs the Financial Services Committee.
What about the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, who will be the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate? She has called the rioters in the street this past summer “civil-justice warriors.”
Inside Congress, there’s a saying: “He who is here without sin. . . . Well, never mind, let’s not go down that road.”