Tag: in-the-news

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of committee assignments because of her pre-election-campaign statements embracing QAnon, 9/11 trutherism, claims that school shootings were faked, Rothschild space lasers, and executing Democrats. (She has apparently renounced most or all of the claims since.) Does that violate the First Amendment?

I think the answer is “no”: Committee appointments are a political process, and are subject to political decisions, including ones based on a person’s constitutionally protected speech. Just as the President is entitled to nominate cabinet members and judges based on past speech he likes—and reject possible nominees based on past speech he dislikes—so Congress can dole out committee positions the same way.

We see this in the longstanding practice of giving members of the majority party more seats on committees. Applied to low-level government employees, such partisan hiring decisions would violate the First Amendment. But when it comes to high-level executive decisionmakers, they are generally just fine, and likewise for Congress. You have a First Amendment right to belong to the minority party, but that means you’re less likely to get the committee assignment you want (since your party has fewer seats on the committees).

Likewise, my sense is that party loyalists are more likely to get the best spots. Again, opposing the party leadership is constitutionally protected against criminal punishment or civil liability, but not against political decisions such as appointment to one or another committee (and, again, same with high-level Executive Branch appointments or judicial appointments). And it’s true as to other speech protected by the First Amendment, recent or past.

There might be First Amendment limits as to other forms of discipline or expulsion (see dictum in Boehner v. McDermott (D.C. Cir. 2007)), whether or not courts could enforce those limits. But that’s a separate matter, I think, from choice of Congressional leadership positions, or from committee assignments.

This having been said, such decisions might be a bad idea. In the words of Jonathan Rauch,

For all its New Testament rhetoric, Washington is an Old Testament city. It is a city which holds, with Beowulf, that it is better to avenge a friend than mourn him. The only rule of conduct is, “Do not unto me, for I will in return do worse unto you.”

It might be better for the majority party to leave a freshman minority party Representative with her typical modest freshman assignments, rather than to invite an escalating tit-for-tat the next time party control flips. (Voters on both sides sometimes elect members who say some pretty offensive things.) But I can’t speak to that; all I can say is that the Constitution doesn’t prevent committee assignments from being a political process, based in part on members’ political activity and political speech.

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Many of my fellow libertarians were rightly in a tizzy after former CIA director John Brennan, commenting on the right-wing insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, noted that the Biden administration is “now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”

In particular, they were dismayed by his description of an “unholy alliance…of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists—even libertarians.” Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff clarified the “even libertarians” comments to Politifact—noting that, “many self-identified libertarians acknowledged their participation in the disgraceful events of 6 January.”

The big concern isn’t the cheap swipe at libertarians, some of whom probably deserve it. Instead, the fear is that Brennan’s words provide a template for the “mission creep” that accompanies every government effort to battle some growing threat.

Let’s dispense with the obvious. The attack on the Capitol was an outrage. The federal government should prosecute those people who committed acts of vandalism or violence. Congress and voters have every right to inflict a political price on elected officials who fanned the flames of the insurgents. Homegrown radicalism is indeed a serious problem.

However, we should be leery about giving the feds additional powers. “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels,” wrote Baltimore’s famed journalist H.L. Mencken. “For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

Or as former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), who was the first member of Congress from the Libertarian Party, tweeted in opposition to a new domestic-terrorism bill: “There are too many federal criminal laws already. Terrorists can be charged under multiple statutes. Laws passed in the heat of the moment, like the Patriot Act, are routinely applied nefariously against law-abiding Americans.” Read that last sentence aloud for effect.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer bomb in a van at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people in the nation’s deadliest terror incident before 9/11. That date marked the second anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas—an event that radicalized McVeigh and his accomplices.

At the time, a militia movement was gaining steam. The Oklahoma City atrocity spurred Congress to pass the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. As is often the case with these “in the heat of the moment” proposals, this measure passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress. President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

The law meant to “deter terrorism, provide justice for victims, provide for an effective death penalty, and for other purposes,” but mainly gutted the right to habeas corpus. Scholars call that constitutional protection the “Great Writ of Liberty” because it provides a process for wrongly imprisoned people to challenge their detention in court.

Fast forward to Oct. 26, 2001, when President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act—a bipartisan effort to protect the country after the September 11 attacks. Critics have penned volumes on the law’s unintended consequences, but this ACLU summary is succinct: “It gives sweeping new powers of detention and surveillance to the executive branch.” It deprives “the courts of meaningful judicial oversight to ensure that the law enforcement powers are not being abused.”

Now here we go again. The 17-page Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 would “authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the federal government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

What could go wrong with giving the feds more open-ended powers? “What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are talking about?” asked former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) on a recent TV news show. She’s right. If you give law-enforcement agencies an inch, they’ll take a yard. In building a profile of extremists, she fears that the feds will zero in on evangelicals—or maybe even libertarians.

Of course, our state government is getting in on the action. State Sens. Henry Stern, (D–Los Angeles) and Tom Umberg (D–Santa Ana) have introduced a bill that would create state investigative teams to “assess potential threats” from right-wing agitators. Such groups definitely are troublesome, but how will the state define these terms? Will it surveil law-abiding people in the process?

You’d think Americans have learned enough from the unintended consequences of those 1996 and 2001 laws to rush down this path again. One needn’t be a member of a wing-nut group—or even a libertarian—to understand how the government might misuse its new powers.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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2/5/1793: Chisholm v. Georgia argued.

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Do you actually own those songs and books you’ve downloaded onto your smartphone? Why is the government able to access your online data without your permission? Why is broadband internet so lackluster in parts of the country? And how exactly does that secret federal surveillance court work?

How we deal with the many privacy and access problems associated with online communications and data storage is the focus of How To Fix the Internet, a six-part podcast organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Hosted by Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien, each episode brings in a guest for a breezy but detailed discussion of a particular internet issue.

The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez (a Reason contributing editor) joins them to discuss the origins and operations of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—an institution initially designed to protect Americans from unwarranted domestic snooping, but which under post-9/11 governance has evolved into something else. Jumana Masa of the Fourth Amendment Center visits to discuss how and why police are often able to demand your private data from tech companies without your permission and sometimes without your knowledge.

Each episode explores how to fix laws that entrench privacy-violating practices and what to do about big tech companies that take advantage of regulations to suppress competitive upstarts.

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After Disney bought the rights to Star Wars from LucasFilm in 2012, it promised a revitalization of the franchise. Fans had mixed feelings about the trio of prequels George Lucas released from 1999 to 2005, and there was a sense that the brand, once the emperor of American pop culture, had fallen into disrepair.

A sequel trilogy, bookended by films directed by J.J. Abrams, debuted to big box office numbers. But the revenues declined as the sequels went on, and the series was plagued by production problems. Fans became increasingly disillusioned. Abrams and Disney, it seemed, had squandered the Star Wars universe. Worse, they had narrowed its scope, focusing on characters and events that sprang from the original series rather than building out the world they inherited.

Yet even as Disney’s megabudget features frustrated fans, two animated television shows—The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels—had been quietly thrilling the franchise faithful. Executive produced by Dave Filoni, the shows filled in the gaps of the Lucas prequels while expanding the cast of Star Wars regulars. Filoni was interested in governance; the show often explored the nooks and crannies of the political and economic order. But he was also interested in people and what motivates them to do right and wrong.

In 2019, Filoni’s vision helped inform The Mandalorian, the first live-action incarnation of Star Wars to hit the small screen. Playful, adventuresome, and at times gently profound, the show offered a revived vision of Star Wars as a playground for elaborate narrative and worldbuilding rather than a simple family saga. At the end of 2020, a second season explicitly connected the show to Filoni’s animated series and began hinting that it might rescue the Abrams-era trilogy too—a new fictional universe built out of the shell of the old one.

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Authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province caned two men 77 times each for having sex with each other. The men were caught when neighbors broke into the room they were sharing and caught them. Aceh is the only province in Indonesia to enforce Islamic shariah law, which calls for up to 100 lashes for gay sex.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court removed Biden v. Sierra Club (formerly known as Trump v. Sierra Club) from its oral argument calendar. This step likely puts an end to the prolonged legal battle over the legality of former President Donald Trump’s diversion of various military construction funds to build his border wall. The Court took this step at the request of the Biden Administration, with the support of the plaintiffs in the case. President Biden recently issued a presidential proclamation ending the diversion of funds for border wall construction, thus likely mooting out the case. In principle, the Supreme Court could still eventually hear the case. But, as a practical matter, there is virtually no chance that they will do so, given that neither side in the litigation wants to continue it, and the issue at stake has been rendered moot by Biden’s reversal of Trump’s policy.

The case in question concerns diversion of funds under Section 8005 of the National Defense Authorization Act, and does not address other wall-building funding diversions that Trump attempted to bring about by declaring a “national emergency” on the southern border. The latter is the subject of litigation in other cases, including a recent Ninth Circuit ruling against the Trump administration. But the same Biden proclamation that terminates the use of Section 8005 funds also revoked Trump’s emergency declaration and forestalled any further efforts to use it to divert funds for the border wall. Thus, it is almost certain that this part of the border wall litigation will end, as well.

Meanwhile, the new NDAA enacted in December includes a useful provision severely limiting the diversion of military construction funds to projects not specifically authorized by Congress. That will make it much harder for future presidents to repeat the sorts of shenanigans Trump resorted to in these cases.

The end of the border wall litigation is also likely to leave in place a variety of valuable lower-court rulings against the Trump administration, which have the valuable effect of making it more difficult for future presidents to raid the treasury to fund pet projects that have not been authorized by Congress. Preventing such intrusions on congressional power over spending is important for reasons that go far beyond the specific context of the border wall cases. The executive must not be allowed to usurp the legislature’s power of the purse. As prominent conservative DC Circuit Judge David Sentelle put it in a procedural ruling against the Trump administration in one of the other border wall cases, “[t]he separation between the Executive and the ability to appropriate funds was frequently cited during the founding era as the premier check on the President’s power.” Judge Sentelle’s decision holding that the House of Representatives had standing to challenge the border wall funding diversion is an important precedent making it easier for either  house of Congress to challenge future executive intrusions on its authority.

Hopefully, the new administration will make sure to preserve the lower-court rulings  by reaching settlement agreements with the plaintiffs in these cases, as it already seems on the way to doing. The administration should also take steps to end eminent domain cases filed against property owners in the border area, and return property previously condemned (if possible).

Some important issues raised by the border wall litigation have not been specifically addressed in lower-court rulings, and now are unlikely to dealt with by the Supreme Court either. These include whether Trump had authorization to use the power of eminent domain to seize property for the border wall, and whether his declaration of a “national emergency” was legal apart from its use to divert construction funds.

In addition, the border wall episode highlights the need for legislative reforms that go beyond that recently enacted in the most recent NDAA. These include legislation to tighten up constraints on federal-government uses of eminent domain, including reforming the compensation system so as to prevent future low-balling of property owners, as has been common in previous border wall takings. We also badly need reforms putting an end to permanent presidentially declared “national emergencies,” along the lines recently proposed by Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, and earlier by Republican Senator Mike Lee.

Despite these caveats, the legal battle over the border wall diversion should be seen as a qualified success for both opponents of the wall, and those who seek to curb presidential usurpation of congressional spending power. At the same time, it is sobering to recognize that things might have turned out differently had the litigation continued, and the Supreme Court decided to overrule the lower court decisions (a plausible, though by no means certain, potential outcome).

 

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From YNetNews:

Researchers at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital on Thursday announced it has seen positive results in preliminary trials for a cure for COVID-19 … [test] on patients in moderate and serious condition …. Of the 30 patients that were given the drug, 29 showed a marked improvement within two days and were released from the hospital three to five days later. One patient also recovered but her recovery took a few days longer, the hospital said….

The Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem also reported on a possible cure. The hospital administered to 21 patients in critical condition who suffered from underlying conditions a drug called Allocetra. According to the doctors, 19 patients recovered within six days and were released from the hospital on average after eight days….

For more on Jewish doctors, see here. For more on Jewish space lasers, see here. Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer, and to Leonard Cohen.

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[This post was co-authored by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman]

On Tuesday, February 2, 2020, the House of Representatives’ Managers filed an 80-page trial memorandum or brief for the impending Senate impeachment trial. The Managers discussion of the First Amendment spans about three pages (pp. 45-48). And the brief cites several posts from Volokh Conspiracy co-bloggers Jonathan Adler, Ilya Somin, and Keith Whittington. These posts responded to our prior Volokh Conspiracy posts. We have five general responses to the position put forward in the trial memorandum. 

First, the trial memorandum states that “the First Amendment does not apply at all to an impeachment proceeding.” We think it a mistake to view impeachment proceedings in this binary fashion: that the First Amendment does, or does not apply to an impeachment proceeding. The phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” in the Impeachment Clause (1788) does not definitively resolve how other provisions of the Constitution—including the not-yet ratified First Amendment (1791)—would apply to impeachment proceedings. Moreover, in our February 3 post, we wrote:

The original meaning of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” in the Constitution is of uncertain scope. And the materials we have from the Philadelphia Convention, the state conventions, and the public ratification debates do not provide clear answers to the precise question we face today. Likewise, past impeachments provide inconclusive, and at times, conflicting precedents. 

As a result, each member of Congress, who takes an oath to the Constitution, acting in good faith, may decide whether, and how the First Amendment should apply in impeachment proceedings. Accordingly, we think it a mistake to make an unqualified statement that “the First Amendment does not apply at all to an impeachment proceeding.” (emphasis added). 

Our position that the First Amendment applies in an impeachment proceeding is not novel. In 1868, during the Johnson impeachment, several Senators contended that an article of impeachment ran afoul of the First Amendment. In our January 17 post, we explained the relevance of these statements:

We do not here, nor did we in our prior post, cite these senators as holding the only view about the scope of the President’s free speech rights in the impeachment context. We acknowledged that some senators who voted to convict, as well as the prosecuting House managers, rejected this free speech argument. Our goal was not to say, and we did not say, that the Johnson trial established the correct position. Rather, we raised this history to show that the issue was, and remains, fairly contestable. In 1868, there was a difference of opinion about what speech rights the President has. That same debate exists today. This issue is not clear. It is not settled. There is no controlling on-point judicial precedent. There is some on-point discussion from a prior presidential impeachment. And those debates from the Johnson Senate trial provide some support for our position. But we do not think this issue has been resolved or liquidated.

We take it as a starting point that some Senators can decide in good faith, based on their Constitutional oath, that the President can raise the First Amendment as a defense in the Senate trial. The question then becomes, what theory of the First Amendment is available to the President.

The fact that the House spends several pages discussing Supreme Court caselaw suggests that the Managers are not willing to rest on the absolute position that the First Amendment is inapplicable. This argument, we think, represents a tacit recognition that Senators, in good faith, could find that the President may raise a First Amendment defense.

Second, in the alternative, the House trial memorandum argues that the First Amendment ought to apply differently to the President. Specifically, in a footnote, the House argues that the President stands in the same position as a civil servant:

Indeed, impeachment is fundamentally an employment action against a public official, and thus the First Amendment would not insulate the President’s statements from discipline even if it applied, because the government’s interest in orderly operation would outweigh the President’s speech interests. See Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006); Connick v. Meyers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983); Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).

We think the Managers erred in analogizing Congress’ power to remove an elected President to an employment action involving civil servants. Many courts have held that First Amendment challenges by elected officials are not governed by Pickering. We say many courts. Not all courts—as with so many issues, authority is divided. Scholarly articles have also touched on this question. For example, Professor Katherine Shaw opined on this issue in her Impeachable Speech. In that article, she stated: 

Outside of the impeachment context, there are of course First Amendment cases that grapple with government officials as speakers. The Pickering/Garcetti line of cases attends to the speech rights of government employees, creating a standard that is understood to grant public employees very limited First Amendment rights when they speak pursuant to their official duties. But it is not clear whether or how the reasoning in these cases would have any application to the unique figure of the president, who is clearly not a government “employee” in the same sense as the officials at issue in the [Supreme] Court’s cases, and where the “sanction” of impeachment is surely distinct from other sorts of professional consequences public employees might face over the content of their speech.

Other precedent could support the argument that a president’s speech is in some sense protected from sanction by the First Amendment. Perhaps most relevant here is Bond v. Floyd, in which the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prevented the Georgia legislature from refusing to seat Julian Bond, based on speeches he had made criticizing the Vietnam War and the federal government generally. A president might invoke this case to support the argument that a Congress pursuing impeachment based in part on speech is engaging in a form of impermissible viewpoint discrimination.

Similarly, we wrote in our January 17 post:

Pickering and Garcetti were cases about civil servants. These precedents do not furnish good analogies to justify removing elected officials [such as the President] for purported speech-related wrongs.

We think Professor Shaw’s position has merit. Professor Shaw also cites the Supreme Court’s First-Amendment-friendly Brandenburg test, and suggests it is relevant to evaluating the constitutionality or lawfulness of impeachments involving speech-related allegations of wrongdoing. 

Third, the House Manager’s trial memorandum seems to recognize that the President does not stand in the same position as a civil servant. The trial memorandum instead analogizes the President to senior appointed officers:

As the leader of the Nation, the President occupies a position of unique power. And the Supreme Court has made clear that the First Amendment does not shield public officials who occupy sensitive policymaking positions from adverse actions when their speech undermines important government interests.

We agree that “public officials who occupy sensitive policymaking positions” stand in a different position than civil servants. And we agree that certain senior appointed federal officers who make policy have reduced Free Speech rights, even below the Pickering standard. We previously wrote that when senior appointed federal officers “speak, their message is more readily mis-identified as that of the President they serve.” As a result, the appointing authority “needs more control over them.” 

The trial memorandum, at footnote 203, cited two cases that reflect this dynamic. In Branti v. Finkel (1980), the Rockland County Public Defender—a Democrat—who was appointed by the County Legislature, planned or intended to discharge two assistant public defenders because they were Republicans. Aaron Finkel and Alan Tabakman had worked for the office for several years, and served at the “pleasure” of the County Public Defender. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled for Finkel and Tabakman based on the First Amendment. But the Court’s decision did not rely on Pickering. These at-will public defenders were not analogous to civil servants. Likewise, Elrod v. Burns (1976) involved “non-civil-service employees” who were “not covered by any statute, ordinance, or regulation protecting them from arbitrary discharge.” Here too, the Supreme Court did not rely on Pickering.

Yet, neither of these cases concerns the status of an elected official. We do not think the President can be analogized to civil servants. And we do not think the President can be analogized to senior appointed federal officers with policy-making responsibilities. 

In our prior post, we explained why the analogy in the Manager’s trial memorandum does not hold:

By contrast, the President is not a cabinet member, who works for a superior—other than the People who act through elections. Nor is the President a GS-15 who can be disciplined for speaking at a political rally. Treating the President as an appointed officer or a civil servant would eliminate the President’s ability to act like a politician and party leader. With good reason, the elected President is not subject to the Hatch Act. He is expected to engage in overtly partisan speech. In our view, the President has more expansive free speech rights than civil servants, who have broader free speech rights than at-will executive-branch officers. There is a hierarchy for speech rights for these different positions. It is not the case that principal officers have more rights than inferior officers who have more rights than civil servants. Government officials and officers are not an undifferentiated mass, with identical First Amendment rights. Nor do these rights track the traditional status of positions in the government. Instead, we suggest that elected officials have the widest scope of free speech rights, civil servants enjoy some free speech rights which are subject to certain limitations, and that at-will presidential appointees enjoy the least.

Fourth, the trial memorandum asserts that the House and Senate stand as the superior over the President, in the same fashion that the President stands as the superior over a cabinet member.

Thus, just as a President may legitimately demand the resignation of a Cabinet Secretary who publicly disagrees with him on a matter of policy (which President Trump did repeatedly), the public’s elected representatives may disqualify the President from federal office when they recognize that his public statements constitute a violation of his oath of office and a high crime against the constitutional order. 

Indeed, in a footnote discussed earlier, the House trial memorandum describes “impeachment [as] fundamentally an employment action against a public official.” These statements reaffirm the House’s position that Congress is the President’s superior. Here, we reach a central point: what is the precise role that Congress plays with respect to impeachment? Is Congress, by virtue of being elected, the superior over the President? We submit the answer is no. It is true that the President draws a salary, as do appointed officers and civil servants. But as a general matter, the President is not considered as an employee, either at-will or subject to some sort of civil service protection. A member of Congress draws salary and can be “removed” by a super-majority of her house. But that does not make a member of Congress an “employee” in the sense that term is commonly used. Professor Shaw, quoted above, expressly rejects analogizing the President to an “employee”—the position asserted in the Manager’s trial memorandum. 

Moreover, we previously wrote:

We reject this analogy between the President and civil servants. Congress is not the superior to the inferior President. They are both elected. They both make policy, within the confines of complying with the legal system. They are both authorized in different ways to control the government-as-employer. As a general matter, Congress does not stand in the role of the employer vis-a-vis the President. If the President has an employer, it is the People, not Congress through impeachment. And that role exists throughout the entirety of a President’s four-year term, and not only during the short election season.

Between elections, Congress does not serve as a stand-in for the People. The impeachment process is not akin to a vote of no-confidence, a common procedure in parliamentary governments. The President will stand for election in four years, and the people can decide whether he warrants re-election. Rather, the Constitution empowers Congress to remove the President if specific legal standards are satisfied. The President is not an at-will employee.

Fifth, the Manager’s trial court brief considers a final argument in the alternative: even if Brandenburg is the relevant standard, the President’s speech is still not protected:

Yet even if President Trump’s acts while occupying our highest office were treated like the acts of a private citizen, and even if the First Amendment somehow limited Congress’s power to respond to presidential abuses, a First Amendment defense would still fail. Speech is not protected where it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Given the tense, angry, and armed mob before him, President Trump’s speech—in which he stated “you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” proclaimed that “[y]ou have to show strength,” and exhorted his supporters to “go to the Capitol” and “fight like Hell” immediately before they stormed the Capitol—plainly satisfies that standard.

Here, we will refer back to Eugene Volokh’s post. Under Brandenburg‘s imminence requirement, Trump’s January 6 speech would be protected speech. The trial memorandum does not even try to show that the January 6 speech would lead to “imminent lawless action.” The memorandum ends with a conclusory statement that Trump’s speech “plainly satisfies that standard.” Were this an indictment brought in court, we doubt that it would result in a conviction. 

[Seth Barrett Tillman is a Lecturer at Maynooth University Department of Law, Ireland (Roinn Dlí Ollscoil Mhá Nuad).]

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“School shootings are absolutely real,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) declared on the floor of the House today as her colleagues debated whether to take away her committee assignments as punishment for her endorsement of wacky right-wing conspiracy theories. “I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened….It’s a tragedy for anyone to say it didn’t happen. I definitely want to tell you I do not believe that it’s fake.”

When a member of Congress feels a need to say things like that, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong with her critical thinking skills at some point. By Greene’s account, it started with her enthusiasm for Donald Trump and her anger at a biased press that falsely and maliciously portrayed him as a Russian stooge. Hungry for alternative sources of information, she “started looking things up on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day.”

In 2017, Greene “stumbled across something…called QAnon,” which posited that Trump was battling a secret cabal of Satan worshippers who eat human flesh and run an international operation that sells children for sex. But Greene said she was mostly interested in QAnon’s rebuttals of the “Russian collusion” charges against Trump, which is what drew her in. “I got very interested in it,” she said, “so I posted about it on Facebook, I read about it, I talked about it, I asked questions about it, and then more information came from it.”

During 2018, Greene said, “I was upset about things and didn’t trust the government…because the people here were not doing the things I thought they should be doing for us.” She added that “a lot of Americans don’t trust our government, and that’s sad.” The problem with such distrust, she said, “is I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret, because if it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I ‘liked’ in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today, and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong, because I’ve lived a very good life that I’m proud of.”

Later that year, Greene said, “I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true, in these QAnon posts.” At that point, “I stopped believing it” and “walked away from those things.”

Greene warned that “any source of information that is a mix of truth and a mix of lies is dangerous,” which is a problem “on the left and on the right.” She averred that the mainstream news media are “just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us.”

As mea culpas go, this one was decidedly mixed. “None of us are perfect,” Greene noted while acknowledging “words that I said and I regret.” But she said the reason she regrets her flirtation with QAnon is that it provided ammunition to her political opponents. Shouldn’t endorsing crazy, defamatory lies against Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros be cause for regret regardless of whether it causes bad publicity for you?

Greene is certainly right that many news outlets are hostile to Trump and promoted allegations about him and Russia that proved to be unfounded. But that hardly means The New York Times—which, after all, eventually reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not substantiate those charges—is as impervious to evidence as QAnon true believers.

Greene also deflected attention from her alarming credulity by complaining about “cancel culture,” repeatedly condemning abortion, and accusing her Democratic colleagues of “condon[ing] riots,” referring to the violence that marred many of last year’s protests against police brutality. Their support of those protests, she suggested, makes her conspiracy mongering pale by comparison.

That is probably not a road Greene wants to head down, since she eagerly promoted Trump’s fantasy that the presidential election was stolen through massive cheating on an unprecedented scale—the imaginary grievance underlying last month’s deadly assault on the building where Greene works. She did not say whether she still thinks Trump actually won the election by a landslide, a belief that is about as plausible as the elaborate plot described by QAnon.

Greene also did not retract her charge that the Clintons killed John F. Kennedy Jr., that Obama is a secret Muslim who commissioned the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Green, that Soros is “a piece of crap” who betrayed “his own people” to the Nazis, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) is a traitor who deserves the death penalty, or that the Rothschilds conspired with California Gov. Jerry Brown to ignite a wildfire with space lasers. Nor did she apologize for sharing a video alleging that “Zionist supremacists” are committing “the biggest genocide in human history” by flooding Europe with nonwhite immigrants. All we know for sure is that she now believes 9/11 actually happened and that children were actually murdered in Newtown and Parkland.

Greene emphasized that she did she did not peddle QAnon fabrications during her campaign or after she was elected in November. “These were words of the past,” she said. “These things do not represent me, they do not represent my district, and they do not represent my values.” That is all well and good, but her district will have to decide whether it wants to be represented by someone this gullible and this oblivious to the implications of casually charging people with grave crimes based on nothing more than “information” some idiot posted online.

“Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) said in a statement he issued yesterday. “I condemn those comments unequivocally. I condemned them in the past. I continue to condemn them today. This House condemned QAnon last Congress and continues to do so today.”

McCarthy nevertheless rejected the suggestion that he should remove Greene from the committees to which she had been assigned, a demurral that set the stage for today’s vote. He faulted Democrats for “choosing to raise the temperature by taking the unprecedented step to further their partisan power grab regarding the committee assignments of the other party.” McCarthy has a point about the risk of that precedent, which Democrats surely would not want to see evenhandedly applied to members of their own party who make controversial comments tinged by bigotry.

Still, it is important for Republican leaders like McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) to repudiate the poisonous views that Greene expressed before she was elected, if only to demarcate the limits of what is acceptable in polite GOP company. That criticism forced Greene, who until recently was dismissing concerns about her outlandish, inflammatory, and divisive statements as much ado about nothing, to offer an accounting of herself, however unsatisfying.

Greene blames her susceptibility to conspiracy theories on her suspicion of government, which is an insult to every rational person who shares that suspicion without falling for baseless, wildly implausible claims like the ones she endorsed. Unlike Greene, I do not think distrust of government is “sad,” and I doubt the Framers, who carefully constructed a system designed to obstruct and frustrate politicians who seek to impose their will on the nation, would have shared her (current) view of that impulse.

But skepticism of government is rooted in a recognition of human foibles and limitations, which do not disappear in the private sector. Politicians sometimes tell the truth, gadflies sometimes tell lies, and both offer up mixtures of the two. As Greene’s experience shows, telling the difference cannot hinge on the identity of the speaker or the political tribe to which he belongs.

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