OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a key pledge to a group on Saturday if he manages to become Speaker in January.
The California Republican vowed to keep an earlier pledge to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who is Muslim, from the House Foreign Relations Committee after she has repeatedly been called out for making what many perceived as anti-Semitic statements since being in Congress.
“We watch antisemitism grow, not just on our campuses, but we watched it grow In the halls of Congress,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2022 leadership meeting in Las Vegas.
“I promised you last year that as Speaker, she will no longer be on Foreign Affairs, and I’m keeping that promise,” he said as the audience cheered, Fox News reported.
A clip of McCarthy making his pledge was posted to Twitter, and it was accompanied by a clarifying statement: “The Speaker does not have the power to remove a member from a standing committee. Foreign Affairs is a standing committee. Each party has their own rules and procedures for assigning committee roles. Only a majority vote by the entire house could remove Rep. Omar.”
Last year, I promised that when I became Speaker, I would remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee based on her repeated anti-semitic and anti-American remarks.
I'm keeping that promise. pic.twitter.com/04blBx3neD
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) November 19, 2022
Fox News added:
Since being elected to Congress in 2018, Omar has made several controversial comments widely deemed to perpetuate antisemitic tropes, including saying it was “all about the Benjamins” for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and tweeting, “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” which was seen as equating Israel and the U.S. to the Taliban.
Before joining Congress, Omar tweeted that Israel had “hypnotized the world.” After being elected, she submitted a resolution to the House that compared boycotting Israel to boycotting the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany.
In June, one of Omar’s challengers, former NBA player Royce White, accused Omar and other members of the “uni-party” of selling out Americans.
During an interview on Fox News, White, who ran as a Republican against Omar, says the Democrat lawmaker is “in on” the “scam” of putting Americans second.
“We’ve been misrepresented, we’ve been misled by the Democrats, by the liberal establishment, by the uni-party that sold us on this fantasy of globalism, which is just another way to attack the American working class,” White said during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“The telltale sign for me is the Fed,” White said. “The Congress is supposed to regulate the Fed. The congress is supposed to balance this budget. And these people have either been too cowardly or too corrupt to do so. Everybody knows or should know that Wall Street is running the Fed and the Fed is regulating the Congress.”
“We are living in the United States of the Federal Reserve,” he added. “And I hear Ilhan Omar and these people talk about these progressive policies, but when push comes to shove, they will sell us out. I come from a history where I fought the NBA and the establishment around mental health policy and around this idea that there is a global corporate community and that there’s something very wrong with this global corporate community.”
Below is a partial transcript of the exchange:
TUCKER CARLSON: Why are you running against Ilhan Omar?
ROYCE WHITE: Thank you for having me, Tucker, I appreciate the time. I will just cut straight to the chase. Look, this country is in a crisis. The only way we can save it is through restoring our faith in God and our national honor. We have to give people security and opportunity. But we have to do it through American constitutional values. Freedom being the cornerstone. Freedom being the cornerstone and we can see that there is an attack on our freedoms.
But we also have to do it through truth. The truth is that the global affects the local. The global affects the local. Minnesota is my home. My family has been here for five generations but I was born and raised here. I have a deep, deep affection for the state of Minnesota, the Twin Cities, my community, and this country.
