One day after the US House voted to banish her from congressional committees, Marjorie Taylor Greene sent a defiant message to both parties Friday, warning that the punishment had only “freed” her to press Republicans further to the right and insist on their allegiance to former President Donald Trump.
In a wide-ranging news conference in front of the Capitol, Ms Greene, a first-term Republican from Georgia, said that although the House’s vote Thursday to remove her from two panels had deprived her constituents of an important voice in Congress, it had personally benefited her.
“Going forward, I’ve been freed,” Ms Greene said. “I’m going to be holding the Republican Party accountable and pushing them to the right.”
Ms Greene’s comments and determination to remain in the spotlight obliterated whatever hopes House Republican leaders may have had that she would quiet down in the name of party unity after her rebuke.
And it underscored the influence the former president, who has effusively praised Ms Greene, still has over some of the loudest voices in Congress.
“The party is his,” Ms Greene said. “It doesn’t belong to anybody else.”
On Thursday, 11 Republicans joined all the Democrats in the chamber in voting to remove Ms Greene’s committee assignments.
Ms Greene has shown varying degrees of contrition for her past embrace of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement, and for her previous comments, which included endorsing the killing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, falsely suggesting that several mass shootings were secretly perpetrated by government actors and spreading a range of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
Asked by a CNN reporter Friday if she would apologise for some of her most offensive comments made before she was elected to Congress, Ms Greene initially instead demanded that the reporter offer an apology for the network’s coverage of the Trump-Russia investigation.
But when another journalist pressed her, she offered her first unequivocal apology to date.
“Of course I’m sorry for saying all those things that are wrong and offensive,” Ms Greene said.
But hours before, she had sounded a different tone.
“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time,” she wrote on Twitter.
“In this Democrat tyrannical government, Conservative Republicans have no say on committees anyway. Oh this is going to be fun!”
