House Republicans voted Thursday to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the influential Foreign Affairs Committee. Surveying the Democratic reaction to the vote, you could be forgiven for assuming Republicans had set a dangerous precedent and exposed their inherent racism. But the truth is that Omar deserved to go and that the process that produced that outcome has become an unremarkable one.
From center-left media outlets to Democratic partisans, restraint was cast aside in the effort to defend Omar. “One of the disgusting legacies after 9/11 has been the targeting and racism against Muslim Americans throughout the United States of America,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., insisted in a speech on the House floor castigating Republicans, “and this is an extension of that legacy.” She added that the Republican vote would constitute “incitement of violence against women of color.”
Omar’s ejection from a single committee isn’t unprecedented or even extraordinary.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., agreed. Was Omar targeted for retribution because of “the way that she looks”? he asked. Or was it because of her “religious practices”? It can’t be that Republicans were honest about their stated rationale, because, Meeks maintains, they would never do this to one of their own. That was the conclusion of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., too. The GOP, he said, is applying a “double, triple, quadruple and beyond standard” to Omar.
The center-left opinion landscape is just as unconflicted about what it witnessed Thursday. “House Republicans removed Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday because she is a Black, Muslim woman,” Mother Jones writer Pema Levy bluntly asserted. At The New York Times, Peter Beinart argued that Omar’s only sin is asking “uncomfortable questions” about her country. For example, Beinart wrote, during a Foreign Affairs hearing about China’s abuses of its Uyghur population,…
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