Kevin McCarthy is putting his cards out on the table. The future Speaker of the House has had a rocky road to leadership over the last week, but he says he is going to make good on a promise that he previously made regarding Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

And quite frankly, if McCarthy doesn’t follow through with this, he doesn’t deserve to be Speaker.

Last year, I promised that when I became Speaker, I would remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee based on her repeated anti-semitic and anti-American remarks.

I'm keeping that promise. pic.twitter.com/04blBx3neD

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) November 19, 2022

As we all know, Ilhan Omar has a loooong track record when it comes to her obvious anti-Semitism.

Since being elected to Congress in 2018, Omar has made several controversial comments widely deemed to perpetuate antisemitic tropes, including saying it was “all about the Benjamins” for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and tweeting, “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” which was seen as equating Israel and the U.S. to the Taliban.”

In a tweet before joining Congress, the Democrat claimed Israel had “hypnotized the world” and after being elected she submitted a resolution to the House comparing boycotting Israel to boycotting the Nazis.”

And the Democrats, every time Ilhan Omar opened her mouth and said something horrible, just kept making excuses and allowing her to walk away from her remarks. As you can see, we have written a LOT about the congresswoman from Minnesota who apparently believes that her constituents are groups like Hamas. And Nancy Pelosi gave her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which she still sits on to this day. And this woman was just re-elected yet again.

Democrats have no room to complain when McCarthy makes this move. After all, they started it by stripping Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, overriding McCarthy. It usually fell to the leader of the caucus to remove members from their committee assignments – for example, when House Republicans (led by Kevin McCarthy) removed Steve King from his committee assignments at the beginning of 2019. Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene is definitely not the brightest bulb in the Republican party, but it was up to the Republican leadership to deal with her. When McCarthy didn’t “punish” her the way the Democrats wanted, they moved to take her out. McCarthy has said that Taylor Greene will get a committee assignment back once he is Speaker, but hopefully he puts her on a committee that will afford her little screen time (which is definitely not what she’s hoping for).

Pulling Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee is probably the least of what Kevin McCarthy should do as Speaker of the House. For example, Representative Eric Swalwell, who was likely sleeping with and definitely compromised by a Chinese spy, is currently serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Judiciary Committee, and the Homeland Security Committee. Does it sound like a good idea to pull an idiot who was such an easy mark for a Chinese spy off these sensitive committees?? Certainly there is just as much, if not more, cause to yank Swalwell off his committees as there is for Ilhan Omar. What about Rashida Tlaib, who is in a race with Ilhan Omar to be the most anti-Semitic member of Congress? Does she belong on the Oversight Committee, focusing on “civil rights and civil liberties”?

With such a narrow majority in the House, McCarthy is going to find that his role is largely reduced to simply being the brick wall that the Biden administration can’t go around, under, or over. And while this tit-for-tat regarding committee assignments seems petty and childish to a certain extent, this is about limiting the damage that an Omar or a Swalwell can do when they open their mouths. Omar continually feeds the flames of anti-Semitism without a thought to how that is perceived by bad people who are willing to act on their hatred (as does Tlaib), and Swalwell has access to information that makes his enormous ego a ripe target to a honeypot working for a foriegn government. Individual districts can send whomever they want to represent them in Congress, but there are no guarantees on committee assignments when the majority disapproves of you, as we have seen the Democrats do. It would have been better to let the GOP deal with their members, and the Democrats deal with their own caucus. But here we are. The House Foreign Affairs Committee isn’t going to miss Ilhan Omar.

Featured image: composite image of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), official Congressional portrait, cropped, public domain, and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), official Congressional portrait, cropped, public domain