After the House voted to deny Rep. Ilhan Omar a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee—using a precedent Democrats recently created but suddenly find deeply offensive—AP tweeted: “BREAKING: House Republicans have voted to oust Democratic Rep Ihan [sic] Omar from the House Foreign Affairs committee. The vote to remove the Somali-born Muslim lawmaker came after her past comments critical of Israel.”
Almost two years ago to the day, the Associated Press reported on the House removing from committees another congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, as so: “BREAKING: The U.S. House votes to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees for spreading violent, racist rhetoric.”
The first thing you’ll notice is that one says “the House” voted to deny Taylor Greene a committee spot, but the other says “House Republicans” booted Omar (and it was the same over at NPR, PBS, Yahoo!, etc.). Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has the power to unilaterally boot Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the intelligence committee, but the entire House was needed to remove Omar.
Obviously both votes were largely along partisan lines, as almost all votes are these days. It’s a newsworthy fact. Yet AP editors simply couldn’t leave that aspect of the story out of the headline for only one of these incidents, even though Democrats acted in an unprecedented manner when creating the precedent.
More misleading, however, is the claim that Taylor Greene was expelled for “spreading violent, racist rhetoric,” but Omar was targeted for the innocuous offense of being “critical
