House Exiles Marjorie Taylor Greene From Panels, as Republicans Rally Around Her

“I truly believe that the majority claiming a new right to be able to exercise a veto over minority committee assignments will ultimately be dangerous for this institution,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the House Rules Committee. “A change in norms away from an institution built on mutual consent and toward an institution where the majority holds a veto power over everything, including committee assignments, is ultimately an institution that cannot function.”

Ms. Greene also told the House that she had broken away from QAnon in 2018. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said, “and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.”

However, that does not square with a series of social media posts she made in 2019, including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced with a body double, an element of QAnon’s fictional story line.

As more revelations about Ms. Greene’s incendiary comments were made public this week, it became clear that Mr. McCarthy would have to address them. At the same time, loyalists to Mr. Trump were agitating to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, of her leadership post as punishment for voting to impeach him.

The debate of the fates of the two women became a proxy battle over the party’s identity and whether it would continue to embrace the former president or reject his brand of politics.

Ms. Cheney ultimately held on to her post after a lopsided vote on Wednesday night at a lengthy closed-door gathering of Republicans. But that vote was taken by secret ballot, while Thursday’s endorsement of Ms. Greene was a very public affair. Eleven Republicans joined Democrats in favor of removing Ms. Greene from her committees.

Still, the episode laid bare deep divisions among Republicans about how to move forward as a party. In the days leading up to the vote on Ms. Greene, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the most powerful Republican in Washington, had denounced her statements, which he called “loony lies,” saying such conspiracy theories were a “cancer” on the party. Several other top Republican senators had joined him in denouncing Ms. Greene and saying she could not become the face of the party.

In an effort to warn Democrats about the move, House Republicans introduced their own proposal to remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from the Foreign Affairs Committee, citing comments she made, including that Israel had “hypnotized the world” from ignoring their “evil doings.” Ms. Omar has publicly apologized for those comments, which drew charges of anti-Semitism.

“If this is the new standard, I look forward to continuing out the standard,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding that Republicans had a “long list” of Democrats they would want to remove from their committees.

On Wednesday, after Democrats had announced they would press forward to rebuke Ms. Greene, Mr. McCarthy issued a lengthy, tortured statement condemning her comments and saying that they had no place among House Republicans, but arguing that she did not deserve to be punished for them. He went further on Wednesday night after Republicans’ contentious, hourslong meeting, telling reporters that Ms. Greene had privately apologized for her previous remarks and suggesting that it was time to move on.

“She said she knew nothing about lasers or all the different things that have been brought up about her,” Mr. McCarthy said, apparently referring to a Facebook post Ms. Greene wrote in 2018 suggesting that devastating wildfires in California had been caused by a space laser controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family with ties to powerful Democrats.

“If we are now going to start judging what other members have said before they are members of Congress, I think it will be a hard time for the Democrats to place anybody on committee,” he added.

Removal from committees is usually reserved for lawmakers who are facing indictments or criminal investigations or who have otherwise broken with their party in a particularly egregious way, according to Eleanor Neff Powell, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ms. Powell, who studies Congress and the committee assignment process, said the most comparable case to Ms. Greene’s situation was when Mr. McCarthy stripped Mr. King of his committee posts. Mr. King lost a primary battle in 2020 after his opponent made the congressman’s inability to legislate on committees a central theme of his campaign.

House Republicans passed an internal rule in 2018 mandating that lawmakers facing felony indictments could not serve on committees, a measure that barred two of their members at the time from their posts, including Duncan D. Hunter of California, who was ultimately convicted of violating campaign finance laws and who refused to give up his assignments.

But the majority party, at least in modern history, has never before leveraged its power to dictate the minority party’s committee assignments.

“Typically the party has asked the person to step aside, they’ve taken the vote themselves, and then the chamber as a whole takes a vote to confirm that action,” Ms. Powell said.

Mr. McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday evening that he had offered to remove Ms. Greene from her two committees and to put her on a panel overseeing small businesses instead, but Democrats declined the offer, he said, insisting that Ms. Greene should not sit on any committees.

Democrats, who have been particularly incensed by Ms. Greene’s previous calls for violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have insisted that Ms. Greene’s conduct demanded extraordinary measures.

“If anybody starts threatening the lives of members of Congress on the Democratic side, we’d be the first to eliminate them from committees,” Ms. Pelosi said.