Kevin McCarthy says he'll strip top Democrats of committee assignments if GOP takes control of House

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published 11 January 2022

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is threatening to remove several prominent Democratic lawmakers from their committee assignments should Republicans take control of the chamber in the midterm elections, a move that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said would be "purely for retaliation reasons."

McCarthy complained to Breitbart on Monday that Democrats "are picking and choosing who could be on a committee. Never in the history have you had the majority tell the minority who could be on committee." If able, McCarthy said he would remove Swalwell and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Last year, two Republican members of the House were stripped of their committee assignments: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. Greene was removed from her committees after it was shown that she previously liked social media posts promoting violence against Democratic lawmakers and made racist and anti-Semitic comments in videos. Gosar was censured and removed from his committees after he shared a doctored anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and attacking President Biden.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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