Last month, we reported [1] that the Alabama Republican Party passed a resolution demanding that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar be removed from Congress. Now, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) has defended the resolution, calling it a “good symbolic gesture.”
“It is a good symbolic gesture by the Alabama Republican Party and Rep. Tommy Hanes out of Jackson County,” Brooks said, according to Yellow Hammer News [2]. “But unfortunately, we don’t have the required legal grounds for expelling Ilhan Omar. And even if we did, we don’t have the votes in the House of Representatives because the Democrats are in control and there’s not a single one who would vote at this point in time to remove her from office.”
Brooks made sure to not rule out that Omar’s expulsion was warranted, however.
“It does shine a spotlight on it,” he said. “Now there are potential grounds for expelling her, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t know if they are true or false. And I could get into any number of them. One might be the unanswered charges against her that she in effect an illegal alien — that she came in under a visa or a family, and the family misrepresented that she was a member of that family, when in fact she was not — that she was given an alias.”
Sign Petition: Remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee [3]
“Now, given this happened so long ago, and she was a minor at the time, I don’t know that you should hold her accountable today for the circumstances if it turns out to be true,” he continued. “But there are a lot of things in Ilhan Omar’s background that I would love to have a proper investigation of. It might deal with taxes. It might deal with something like adultery. Or where she was reportedly married to her own brother for some period of time perhaps in order to get him into the United States of America.”
“Let me emphasize: There are a lot of these things out there,” Brooks continued. “I don’t know if they’re true or not and Rep. Ilhan Omar does a fairly good job of denying those that make these kinds of inquiries the information that would be needed to properly rebut or to confirm these kinds of accusations. But after all, when you get down to it — she was elected by her people. And I think that is going to be the general principle in the House of Representatives that it is up to her own constituents to decide whether to keep her in the United States Congress or replace her with someone that they perceive is better.”