House, Led By Democrats, Kicks Greene Off Committees

House Democrats on Thursday stripped controversial GOP lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. The nearly party-line vote was 230-199, the Washington Post reports, with 11 Republicans voting against her. The rare move came a day after House Republicans opted not to take action against the Georgia Republican. Coverage:

• The freshman lawmaker has been under fire for recently unearthed posts and comments she made before being elected Congress in which she backed QAnon conspiracy theories, supported the idea that the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings were hoaxes, and even backed violence against Democratic lawmakers, per Politico.
• In a Thursday speech on the House floor, Greene expressed regret for her "words of the past" without explicitly apologizing, reports the AP. Greene said she was a "very regular American" before coming to Congress who passed along QAnon theories and the like, but she said they did not represent her true views. (She said much the same in a closed-door GOP conference meeting Wednesday night, according to Politico.)
• “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them and that is absolutely what I regret,” she said Thursday, per the Wall Street Journal. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong, because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of.”

• The controversy speaks to the GOP struggle at the moment to strike an internal balance between the pro-Trump camp (that includes Greene) and GOP critics of the former president's behavior, such as Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican. Witness what the Politico Playbook calls the "head-spinning night" on Wednesday, when the GOP conference gave strong support to Cheney while declining to punish Greene.
• Greene had sat on two House panels: the Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee, per CNN.
• Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she was “profoundly concerned" by Republicans' "acceptance of an extreme conspiracy theorist," adding, “If any of our members threatened the safety of other members, we'd be the first ones to take them off a committee." But GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday night accused Democrats of a "partisan power grab" and said they were setting a dangerous precedent in moving to remove Greene from committees.

(More Marjorie Taylor Greene stories.)