Alabama Republicans, Who Supported Accused Sex Criminal Roy Moore, Want Ilhan Omar out of Congress for Having Opinions
Photo courtesy of Getty Politics Features Ilhan Omar
So, this is really rich: The Alabama Republican Party took it up on itself to pass a resolution at their summer meeting on Tuesday saying that Rep. Ilhan Omar should be expelled from Congress. Now, you may be thinking, “wait, doesn’t Ilhan Omar represent Minnesota, which is far away from Alabama?” That is correct! But it didn’t stop the GOP from endorsing language like this:
WHEREAS, Rep. Omar has engaged in rhetoric that explicitly runs counter to American values and patriotism by falsely accusing U.S. armed forces of committing war crimes while on mission to liberate her home country of Somalia
The rest is predictable—Omar said “some people did something” about 9/11, she’s anti-Semitic, she loves ISIS. Paste (along with many others) has previously debunked most of this, and Jacob Weindling wrote about how conservatives in politics and the media who routinely question her “patriotism” are actively putting her life in danger. But it will never stop, because the right loves nothing more than a villain…proven by the fact that a bunch of Alabama Republicans with nothing better to do attacked her for no reason.
The great irony, of course, is that the state GOP most recently made national news by supporting a man who allegedly committed sexual assault against underage women. On Twitter, Rep. Omar took them to task for their hypocrisy:
Sorry, @ALGOPHQ, but this is a representative democracy.
I was elected with 78% of the vote by the people of Minnesota’s 5th District, not the Alabama Republican Party.
If you want to clean up politics, maybe don’t nominate an accused child molester as your Senate candidate? https://t.co/r9NvsZKRUw
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) August 27, 2019
Of course, the attacks will persist, and Omar will continue to live under the shadow of threats for simply being a Muslim woman who has the audacity to participate in democracy and express her opinions. For some Republicans, there’s no greater crime.