Pelosi says ‘cowardly’ McCarthy has made GOP the QAnon party over Marjorie Taylor Greene scandal

House speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted her Republican counterpart Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday over his “cowardly refusal” to unseat representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees over her past comments on social media endorsing violence against Democrats and backing conspiracy theories, mocking him as “(Q-CA),” a QAnon supporter.

“McCarthy has chosen to make House Republicans ‘the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon’ and Rep. Greene is in the driver’s seat,” wrote speaker Pelosi in a statement on Wednesday. 

The Democratic leader was one of Ms Greene’s targets on social media, where, prior to being elected, she liked a comment calling for a “bullet to the head” as a means to remove Ms Pelosi from office. 

House Democrats have bucked tradition and are moving towards a vote to strip Ms Greene, a Republican from Georgia, of her committee assignments, even though committee roles are usually decided internally. 

“McCarthy’s failure to lead his party effectively hands the keys over to Greene — an anti-Semeite, QAnon adherent and 9/11 Truther,” Ms Pelosi added in the statement. 

Ms Greene is the political heir to Donald Trump’s incendiary, conspiratorial, oftentimes racist political style, and record of her past positions—dismissing school shootings as staged, threatening Muslim members of Congress, backing QAnon, objecting to the certification of the election results even after the Capitol riots—are driving a wedge through the GOP and inspiring fierce condemnations from Democrats.

Republican leadership, some of whom have condemned Ms Greene’s comments, met with her on Tuesday and later discussed further reprimanding her, though didn’t reach a conclusion. Top GOP leaders like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and influential moderate Mitt Romney have respectively blasted Ms Greene as a “cancer” and a “kook” who doesn’t belong in the party, while representative Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat from California, has moved to expel her from Congress.

In response to the growing pressure to demote Ms Greene, some Republicans in Congress have urged that representative Ilhan Omar, a frequent target of Ms Greene’s Islamophobic comments, be stripped of her committee assignments as well, which Ms Omar called a “desperate smear rooted in racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.”  

The embattled Georgia rep has said some of the past posts in question were done by staff and didn’t represent her views, and claimed on Wednesday the backlash was racial discrimination against her as a white female Christian. 

“If @SpeakerPelosiwas the minority leader, she would pull every identity politics trick in the book to defend her member (sic). White, Woman, Wife, Mother, Christian, Conservative, Business Owner. These are the reasons they don’t want me on Ed & Labor,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s my identity & my values.”