House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy is trying to kick three Democrats off of important committees in retaliation for the Democrats kicking Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar from their committees last year and refusing to seat Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks on the Jan. 6 panel. It was the Democrats who broke with precedent and who should now pay the price for it.
McCarthy’s efforts to keep the misinformation-spewing Rep. Adam Schiff and the unpunished member who slept with a Chinese spy and gave her access to sensitive information, Eric Swalwell, off the House Intelligence Committee were successful. But kicking Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee is a different matter and requires a majority of the full House to agree.
Both parties agree that Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite. But she’s also a Muslim, which all Democratic members can’t bring themselves to vote against. Besides, Democrats want to pin Omar’s disqualification solely on Republicans.
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But it’s not always that simple to go tit-for-tat on an issue. What if the norm being violated is actually valuable?
One school of thought says that two wrongs don’t make a right, and so a party that believes in a norm should follow it even if the other side doesn’t. Another school of thought says that the only way to stop your political opponents from violating a norm is to give them a downside for doing so by imposing consequences — which may be meted out in kind. Both of these arguments have a point. Which to follow in a particular situation depends in large part upon what moral value the norm serves.
It may be good and noble to follow a norm even if the other side doesn’t. But in politics, one should only be noble when one can afford to be noble. It’s like being green — we should only be as green as our economy allows us to be. Saving the forests is a great idea until the choice comes down to saving an oak tree or building my dining room table.
There is also something to the argument that some norms are only valuable when both sides agree to follow them. This is especially true when the majority doles out committee seats.
By tradition, the size of each caucus determines how many committee seats its members have in the House, and each party picks who fills that share of the seats. The majority does not use its power — which no rule of the House could constrain — to dictate which members of the minority may sit on which committees. There is no constitutional constraint involved, because the Constitution says nothing about committees and invests each house of Congress with plenary powers over its own rules.
But Democrats said to hell with tradition and kicked MTG off the Budget Committee and the Education and Labor Committee. That set the stage for the current argument about keeping Omar on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Rep. Greene was kicked off her committees for “liking” Twitter and Facebook posts threatening violence — indirectly — against Democrats. But most Republicans — including McCarthy — thought that the Ethics Committee should have handled those complaints and meted out whatever punishment they felt Greene deserved.
That was the norm prior to Democrats taking matters into their own partisan hands and kicking Greene off her committees.
Three values are served by the norm of the majority restraining itself from booting members of the minority from committees. The primary value is that it prevents a vicious cycle of retributions when each side takes its turn in the majority. Another value is that it respects democracy: The people of each district elect representatives, and even if those representatives are seriously sketchy people, seating them on committees is done out of respect for the people they represent and their right to a say in the places where the House uses its lawmaking and oversight powers. The third value is that leaving the discipline of wayward members to each caucus promotes political responsibility: If a party won’t remove a Marjorie Taylor Greene or an Ilhan Omar from sharing the benefits of its caucus, it can be made to pay an electoral price, whereas if it becomes customary for the House majority to discipline members of the minority, the minority can always just wash its hands of the matter.
The operating principle in these matters should be mutually assured destruction; if Democrats are going to bypass the Ethics Committee and take disciplining Republican members into their own hands, Republicans will do the same now that they are in the majority. Saying goodbye to Rep. Omar is the right thing to do in these circumstances.
What’s more, Republicans shouldn’t stop at kicking Omar off her committee. Maybe AOC doesn’t belong on any Committee having to do with capitalism, like the House Banking Committee? And why should any Democrat serve on the Ethics Committee?
Republicans need to understand the political war they are in. Until they do, Democrats are going to come out on top every time.
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