Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) called for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to be removed from Congress on Monday after the far right lawmaker remarked that, had she led the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she would have “won.”
At a gala held by the New York Young Republicans Club over the weekend, Greene said that, “if Steve Bannon and I organized [the attack], we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” In response, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
The comment — and its gesture toward violence — seems to imply that Greene thinks she would have been successful in leading right-wing militants into the chambers of Congress to murder lawmakers or hold them hostage to prevent them from certifying the result of the 2020 election, which was the stated goal of some of the militants who stormed the Capitol that day, according to court documents.
In a video posted on Twitter, Bowman expressed his anger over the comment.
“Sometimes what this person says is so outrageous that I don’t even want to respond. But I have to respond to this,” he said. “When we are elected to Congress, we take an oath to protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. Marjorie Taylor Greene is an enemy of the Constitution and of our country and she should be expelled from Congress.”
“This is incredible that this comes out of this person’s mouth and things like this continue to come out of her mouth,” Bowman continued. “She needs to be expelled from Congress immediately and the Republican Party should condemn everything she said and take the steps to expel her.”
Greene, a self-identified Christian nationalist, is constantly spewing vitriol and expressing contempt for basic freedoms in the U.S. Her presence and influence within the Republican Party is widely perceived as extremely dangerous. In her short time in Congress, she has gone from a fringe lawmaker to a centerpiece of the party, as both an emblem and a progenitor of the current fascist extremism of the party.
Lawmakers like Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) have put forth legislation to investigate and expel lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election just hours after the Capitol breach, saying that their votes were an implicit show of support for the attack and its cause.
Greene has gone further than any of those Republicans in her calls for right-wing extremism in the nearly two years since the attack. Last year, she faced specific calls from dozens of lawmakers, including prominent progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), to be expelled over videos posted to her Facebook in which Greene says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) will “suffer death or she’ll be in prison” for “treason.”
The far right extremist also faced calls to resign earlier this year when she spoke at an event featuring white nationalists. One of the featured speakers was white supremacist, fascist and anti-semite Nick Fuentes, one of the most hateful and extremist right-wing commentators in the conservative sphere and once-friend of Greene.