House Republican leaders condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene's Holocaust comparison after 5 days and a wave of outrage
House Republican leaders have condemned incendiary remarks from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene five days after she first publicly compared Capitol Hill mask rules to the Holocaust, amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics as well as Jewish groups aimed at the Georgia congresswoman and the party leaders' silence.
Posted — Updated"Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling," House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement five days after Greene's original comments and after she made similar comparisons Tuesday. "Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language."
The No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, also responded to Greene's comments for the first time on Tuesday.
"Rep. Scalise does not agree with these comments and condemns these comparisons to the Holocaust," Scalise spokesperson Lauren Fine said in a written statement that also attacked Democrats.
In remarks first reported widely on Friday, Greene compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps the Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust.
Greene, in a conversation with the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody Real America's Voice TV show "The Water Cooler," attacked Pelosi and accused her of being a hypocrite for asking GOP members to prove they have all been vaccinated before allowing members to be in the House chamber without a mask.
"You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany," Greene said at the time. "And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."
On Tuesday, Greene continued to ramp up her rhetoric, tweeting once again her thoughts about vaccine requirements and the Holocaust.
"I never compared it to the Holocaust, only the discrimination against Jews in early Nazi years. Stop feeding into the left wing media attacks on me," Greene tweeted. "Everyone should be concerned about the squads support for terrorists and discrimination against unvaxxed people. Why aren't they?"
This story is breaking and will be updated.
Copyright 2024 by Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
