At the Alabama Republican Party’s summer meeting last month in Auburn, State Rep. Tommy Hanes (R-Bryant) led a successful effort to make it the official position of the ALGOP that U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) be expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives.
A resolution that passed by voice vote at that meeting called on Alabama’s U.S. congressional delegation to seek Omar’s expulsion. However, one member of the delegation, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville), is skeptical if such a move is merited.
During an appearance on Huntsville radio’s WVNN on Thursday, Brooks called Hanes’ effort 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 on “The Jeff Poor Show.” “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 would not rule out the possibility, however, that Omar’s expulsion was warranted. The Madison County Republican laid out aspects of Omar’s background that could be grounds for removal but added the caveat her constituents still elected her to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“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. 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. 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,” he 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.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV and host of “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN in Huntsville.
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.