House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, have agreed to establish a bipartisan task force that will implement a process to remove members from committees, aides for the two lawmakers told NBC News.
McCarthy is already contacting members to join the committee and Jeffries is developing a list of Democrats to serve on the committee. The plan comes on the heels of McCarthy engineering the removal of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Several Republicans communicated their concern that the system used to remove Omar lacked proper due process. There was also unease when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar from their committee assignments during the last Congress.
McCarthy’s promise to revamp the process and create the task force gave him the votes he needed to remove Omar.
In February 2021, the Democratic-held House voted to remove Greene from the Budget Committee and the Education and Labor Committee because of social media posts where she was spreading what Democrats described as dangerous and racist conspiracy theories.
Later, that following November, the House voted to remove Gosar from the Oversight and Reform and Natural Resources after he posted an animated video that showed him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and attacking Joe Biden.
McCarthy required a vote of the full House to remove Omar but McCarthy used his power as speaker to block and remove Democrats Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff from the Intelligence Committee.
Three Republican lawmakers - Nancy Mace, Victoria Spartz and Ken Buck - came out early against the effort for several reasons. McCarthy enticed them to vote against Omar by committing to reworking the removal process. McCarthy has committed to instituting the rules so that members would be referred to the House Ethics Committee before a resolution is drawn up to strip them of their committee assignments.
Spartz wanted to add due process language in the resolution, Buck said McCarthy suggested he was willing to reform the process for kicking members off committees and Mace said the speaker offered her a "commitment" that there would be a fix to rules that would refer members to the House Ethics Committee before a resolution is drawn up to strip them of their committee assignments.
McCarthy on Thursday said two of those lawmakers — Mace and Buck — will be part of the bipartisan group who will write a code of conduct. And he has asked Jeffries to choose himself and a couple of members to be included in the group.