McConnell adviser says GOP should cut ties with Marjorie Taylor Greene to make her ‘most useless congressperson’

A longtime adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is urging Republicans on Capitol Hill to purge Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from the party so she has no influence in Washington.

Kicking Ms Greene out of the House GOP conference over her right-wing conspiracy theories and past threats against Democratic lawmakers would leave her without any committee assignments, where members typically perform most of their work.

Ms Greene is the first member of Congress who openly supported the right-wing QAnon conspiracy movement, which maintained that Donald Trump, as president, was waging a covert war against a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibals comprised of Hollywood elites, Democratic politicians, and others.

“I actually don't think she should be expelled because I think voters should decide who represents them. But I think voters need all the information. And I think the Republican Party, however, can decide who is allowed to carry its banner,” GOP commentator and former aide to Mr McConnell Scott Jennings said in an interview with CNN on Sunday.

“The party and Kevin McCarthy ought to strip her of her committees. I think they ought to say, 'We're not associated with this person,'” Mr Jennings said.

He added: “She could be a congressperson, but it would become immediately apparent to the people in Georgia that they've got the weakest and most useless congressperson out there because she's not allowed to be associated with one of the two major parties.”

CNN alleged that Ms Greene has been wiping down her social media accounts to get rid of the conspiracy-riddled content she posted or “liked” in 2018 and 2019. Her account liked posts about executing Democrats in Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

She has also been captured on video accosting David Hogg, a gun control activist who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.

Ms Greene has claimed, falsely, that the Parkland shooting was a “false flag” operation and that the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 was staged.

Her videos and comments on social media have been marked by racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.

Ms Pelosi last week said she was concerned by Republican leaders in the House who were “willing to overlook, ignore those statements," by Ms Greene. Earlier this month, on 6 January, members of Congress were forced to hide from QAnon supporters and Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol in the belief that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from Mr Trump.

Scores of Democratic lawmakers have called for Ms Greene’s removal from Congress, which would require a two-thirds vote from House members. But with the Democrats holding just a slim majority of seats, that would require a substantial portion of the House GOP voting one of their own out of office, which is highly unlikely.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy plans to sit down and speak with Ms Greene this week, his office has told Politico. Mr McCarthy will determine Ms Greene’s future in the party based on that meeting.

The GOP leader held a similar meeting in 2019 with former Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King, who had defended the term “white nationalism” in an interview with the New York Times that year. Mr King reportedly refused to back down from his comments — which he claimed, falsely, were misquoted by the Times — and Mr McCarthy and the House GOP stripped him of his committee assignments.

While Ms Greene has scrubbed her social media of the bizarre and dangerous posts that helped her gain popularity in fringe right-wing circles and gear up for her 2020 congressional bid, she has shown no hint of remorse for any of her past beliefs.

“I will never back down. I will never give up,” she said in a statement on Friday.

Ms Greene also says she has the “full support” of Mr Trump, after they spoke on the phone last week.

Mr Jennings, the former McConnell aide and GOP commentator, said on Sunday it’s members like Ms Greene who have rendered the Republican party a “minority party.”

“At the end of the day, if the Republican Party wants to be the sandwich board caucus, we're going to be a minority party,” Mr Jennings said, referring to members who are known to espouse conspiracy theories.

“We haven’t won the national popular vote — the presidential election, unless your last name was Bush — since 1984. And so I don't personally want to be a minority party. I want to be a national majority governing party. And to cast away all these suburban center-right voters to die on the Marjorie Taylor green sandwich board caucus hill — that's not a good idea.”

Freshman Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush has moved offices away from Ms Greene, claiming she and her staff were berated by the Georgia congresswoman in an altercation where she refused to wear a mask.

Ms Bush said she is not “scared” of Ms Green, but that she is “here to do a job for the people of St​ Louis,” and Ms Greene’s presence interferes with that work.

“What I cannot do is continue to look over my shoulder wondering if a white supremacist in Congress, by the name of Marjorie Taylor Greene … is conspiring against us,” she said.

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