Kevin McCarthy vows to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs Committee

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) vowed to remove Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from her committee duty for her “repeated anti-Semitic and anti-American remarks.”

McCarthy announced that he was removing Omar from her position on the Foreign Affairs Committee during a speech he delivered Saturday at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2022 leadership meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“We’re watching anti-Semitism grow, not just on our campus, but we’ve seen it grow in the halls of Congress,” McCarthy told the audience.

“I remember what she said about me,” McCarthy said said. “I remember what she said about Israel. I remember what she said about Israel [U.S.-Israel] Relationship. I remembered it so much.”

“I promised you last year that as a speaker she would no longer be in charge of foreign affairs and I’m keeping that promise,” he said as the crowd cheered.

He doubled his promise in a tweet which read: “Last year I promised that if I became Speaker, I would remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for her repeated anti-Semitic and anti-American comments. I keep that promise.”

However, Twitter added a fact check to McCarthy’s tweet, denying his ability to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

“The Speaker does not have the power to remove a member from a standing committee. Foreign Affairs is a standing committee,” the Twitter fact check explained. “Each party has its own rules and procedures for assigning committee roles. Only a majority vote of the entire House could remove Rep. Omar.”

In January, McCarthy first floated the idea of ​​not only removing Omar from the committee, but also removing Democrats Adam Schiff (California) and Eric Swalwell (California) from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

“Democrats created a new thing where they pick and choose who can be on committees,” McCarthy said. “Never in history [of Congress] Did you let the majority tell the minority who can be on the committee? But this new standard that these Democrats voted for — if Eric Swalwell can’t get a private sector security clearance, there’s no reason he should get one to be at Intel or Homeland Security. He will not serve there.”

McCarthy will likely become the next speaker of the House once Republicans take the majority in January.

In March 2018, Omar claimed that McCarthy’s support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins.”

Omar shot the US-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She also accused pro-Israel American lawmakers of double loyalty.

In 2012, Omar claimed that Israel had “hypnotized the world”.