House Speaker Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have grand legislative ambitions. He has no policy agenda to speak of. There’s no list of governing priorities that he keeps in his jacket pocket. The California Republican wanted the gavel and the great office with a beautiful view, and now that he paid a high price to get those rewards, the congressman appears largely content.
But he did place a great emphasis on one goal: The GOP leader cared a lot about Democratic committee assignments.
Early last year, 11 months before the midterm elections, McCarthy said one of his top priorities — if Republicans took back the majority — was removing Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee. He recently did exactly that.
But McCarthy also said in early 2022 that he was determined to kick Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Yesterday, as NBC News reported, the speaker checked this off his to-do list, too.
House Republicans voted Thursday to oust Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the Foreign Affairs Committee — the latest skirmish in a long-running partisan battle over committee assignments. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had faced a handful of GOP defections, but by Thursday he and his team had whipped GOP members back in line, and 218 Republicans voted to back the resolution condemning Omar for past antisemitic comments and removing her from the committee.
The final tally was 218 to 211, falling neatly along party lines. (Republican Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio voted “present.”)
The outcome was in doubt up until fairly recently. A handful of House GOP members balked at the idea, including Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who recently issued a statement describing such efforts as a “charade,” adding, “Speaker McCarthy needs to stop ‘bread and circuses’ in Congress and start governing for a change.”
McCarthy ignored the skepticism and plowed forward. Indeed, he invested real…
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