Ilhan Omar fires back after Alabama Republicans call for her expulsion from Congress
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is firing back in a public feud with the Alabama Republican Party. Omar called out the state GOP for its support of a Senate candidate that was embroiled in numerous sexual assault allegations, after the state party urged that she be expelled from Congress.
According to AL.com, Alabama Republicans moved to support a resolution calling for the removal of the freshman congresswoman, citing her past controversial statements on the September 11th terrorist attacks, which her supporters said were taken out of context; comments she made on campaign finance that many considered to be anti-Semitic, for which she apologized; and her staunch support of the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli government.
In their resolution, the party calls for its state's congressional delegation to begin the process of seeking Omar's expulsion from the House.
Omar, however, noted that she was elected by the people of Minnesota's fifth congressional district, "not the Alabama Republican party."
In that same tweet, Omar suggested that if Republicans wanted to "clean up politics" they shouldn't move to nominate "an accused child molester as your Senate candidate" — an apparent reference to embattled former judge Roy Moore, who lost a special election for Senate in 2017 after several women went public with allegations against him.
Sorry, @ALGOPHQ, but this is a representative democracy.
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) August 27, 2019
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
Moore announced back in June that he was throwing his hat back into the ring and running for Senate in the state, looking to defeat incumbent Doug Jones in a rematch. Moore, a Republican, narrowly lost to Jones in a 2017 special election to fill former Attorney General Jeff Sessions' vacant Senate seat.
Taking a page out of President Trump's playbook, Moore has repeatedly lambasted Democrats for carrying out what he claimed was "evidence of intent to disrupt a state Senate race" after both Republicans and Democrats widely condemned his 2017 run as numerous women came forward with detailed accounts of sexual misconduct against Moore when he was a judge and many of the accusers were minors. Moore has denied any wrongdoing.
He said such "collusion" by Democratic operatives in Washington would not be tolerated and claimed, without evidence, Jones was the "beneficiary of election hacking."