Guess who's back ... back again
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are back on GOP-led House committees
Nearly two years after being ignominiously booted from her spots on both the House Budget and Education and Labor Committees, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is back with a seat on the powerful Homeland Security Committee, pending an all-but-assured conference-wide vote to confirm the assignment, CNN reported Tuesday.
The reportedly unanimous decision to re-seat Greene comes as the GOP House Steering Committee continues to mete out assignments to party members for the coming legislative term. Greene, then a first-term lawmaker, initially lost her seats in 2021 in response to her history of inflammatory, extremist, and conspiratorial statements, some of which questioned the events of 9/11 and various high-profile school shootings. Since then, both Greene and now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had forecast that she would regain at least some committee assignments under a Republican House majority.
Greene is not, however, the only far-right representative to have their exile from the House committee process reversed under McCarthy's rule: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has also been assigned a spot on the House Natural Resources Committee, on which he previously served before his censure in late 2021. Similar to Greene, McCarthy had initially offered assurances that Gosar, who frequently associated with white nationalist figures such as Nick Fuentes, would regain a committee seat, predicting at one point that "the committee assignments they have now — they might have other committee assignments. They may have better committee assignments."
Notable in all this is the fact that while Gosar, who was among the small group of GOP holdouts to McCarthy's speaker's bid, was simply returned to his old committee, Greene, who enthusiastically backed the now-speaker in a broader pivot toward the Republican mainstream, did indeed receive an upgrade from her initial assignments.
McCarthy has committed to giving freshman GOP Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) a committee assignment as well, despite the growing list of demonstrative falsehoods and potentially criminal scandals in which the newly elected lawmaker has found himself embroiled.
McCarthy had previously claimed that Santos, who also backed his speaker bid, should not serve on any of the House's more powerful bodies, such as the Ways and Means or Appropriations Committee.