Even the most far-right members of the House Republican Conference are condemning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Georgia) hijacking of a recent committee hearing.
During a Thursday night meeting of the House Oversight Committee, members were debating legislation to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt when Greene suddenly insulted Rep. Jasmine Crockett's (D-Texas) "fake eyelashes." This resulted in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) coming to Crockett's defense, demanding that Greene's words be struck from the record and for the Georgia Republican to apologize. Crockett asked committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) if, hypothetically, she would be in the wrong for mentioning that a certain member of the committee had a "bleach blonde, bad built butch body."
Crockett recounted the incident in an interview with the Daily Beast, saying that Greene's comment about her eyelashes was "absolutely a racist thing."
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"Any woman that knows anything about makeup and getting done up knows that eyelashes are one of those things that kind of come with it," she said. "MAGA has been trolling on social media for a while and it’s a way of them basically calling me ghetto and things like that, because of my hair and my lashes and my nails."
"It’s almost like, well, we don’t have anything intelligent to counter that with. So instead, we’ll be racist and we’ll attack her and go after her looks. Which, frankly, I am not lacking in my confidence about my looks…. but they do it all the time," she added. "So I think this was just a fundraising ploy for her and it’s also just her brand. Her brand is chaos and ignoring the rules."
The only Republican on the Oversight Committee to vote with Democrats to silence Greene for the remainder of the hearing was Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), who has publicly squabbled with Greene in the past. Boebert suggested the far-right Georgia congresswoman was making other Republicans look bad with her behavior.
"It was embarrassing what was going on," Boebert said on Capitol Hill. "I couldn’t bring myself to stand in defense of that, I wouldn’t do it for the other side."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) also weighed in on the fracas, saying Greene's outburst was "not a good look for Congress."
The Oversight Committee eventually approved the contempt resolution against Garland, in response to the attorney general refusing to hand over audio recordings of President Joe Biden's conversations with former Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur. After concluding his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents, Hur declined to charge the president with any crimes.
Ocasio-Cortez later tweeted that the resolution was approved notably without any votes on any amendments, which she characterized as an extraordinary breach of the legislative process on Comer's part.
"You see, this is the microcosm of what authoritarians do on a larger scale," she wrote. "ID a vulnerable person/community that’s easier to break the rules towards, normalize it (often w/ “both sides” rhetoric), and then use that rule-breaking to undermine deeper processes and rule of law."
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