The vote by four Latino Republican members of Congress to strip their GOP colleague of her committee posts for her espousal of QAnon falsities and conspiracy theories was the "right decision," according to a former Latino Republican legislator.
A Democratic analyst described it as "one sane vote," since most of the legislators had backed then-President Donald Trump's lies about a stolen election by voting to challenge the Electoral College votes certifying Joe Biden's win.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Florida Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar were among only 11 Republicans who joined Democrats on Thursday in voting against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy movement. The vote prevailed.
The vote regarding Greene and her comments follows the alarming growth of misinformation and disinformation among Latino voters; in Florida, it was notable in Spanish-language social media and it tended to favor Trump. The disinformation gained ground when the pandemic began, with the rhetoric circulating widely on Facebook, WhatsApp groups and A.M. radio stations.
Carlos Curbelo, a former Florida Republican congressman and current NBC News and MSNBC political analyst, said the vote by the three Florida Republicans wasn’t surprising “given the reckless and insensitive nature" of Greene's statement that the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a hoax.
Seventeen people were killed in the February 2018 shooting.
“This will afford them the chance to make the case that they are taking each vote individually and trying to reach the best decision,” Curbelo said. He said some voters will be upset by how the lawmakers voted, particularly Republican primary voters. But in South Florida, he said, “broadly speaking, this will be widely appreciated.”
But importantly, the Hispanic Republicans "voted to essentially condemn the proliferation of lies," Curbelo said. "I think if that's why they voted the way they did, I think it’s the right decision."
Fernand Amandi, a Florida Democratic political consultant, said the Latino Republicans' rejection of Greene and her regurgitation of QAnon conspiracy theories was the one "sane vote" of the recent votes by the lawmakers.
All but Salazar voted last month to overturn the election results after the deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Salazar was not yet sworn in when the votes took place.
None of the Republican lawmakers voted to impeach Trump on a charge that he incited the riot.
"We're trying to applaud this vote, but how can you reconcile it with their previous votes? The line of logic can only be described as schizophrenic," Amandi said.
Voting to reject the election results and against impeaching Trump "in essence fall into the same line of thinking of QAnon," Amandi said.
For several of the Latino lawmakers, the votes to remove Greene came with some qualification.
“I’ve previously stated that MTG’s comments are unacceptable, & today I voted to remove her from her committee assignments,” Diaz-Balart said in a tweet after the vote. He also said there were members that should be removed from their committee assignments "for their irresponsible, inflammatory speech.”
Diaz-Balart went on to name in a Twitter thread Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and Cynthia McKinney, a former Georgia Democratic representative who left office in 2007.
Like Diaz-Balart, Malliotakis and Salazar named Omar in statements they tweeted, while Gimenez made an implied reference to her in his tweet.
The lawmakers' elections were helped by false information in the 2020 campaign that portrayed all Democrats, including Biden, as socialists and their policies as bringing about the socialism and communism of Cuba and authoritarianism of Venezuela.
After defeating Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, Gimenez declared in his victory speech that the win was “a rejection of socialism and the evils of socialism and communism, and that’s not just rhetoric.”
Salazar, Gimenez and Malliotakis are all members of what they call the Freedom Force, which they first billed as an anti-socialism group to counter the group of liberal Democrats led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called The Squad.
Carlos Gutierrez, former Secretary of Commerce in the George W. Bush administration, said the Republican GOP congressional members who voted to remove Greene from her committees helped themselves politically in the short-term. He said they were able to cast that vote but not vote to impeach Trump and to vote against the election results "because that is the party today."
He warned that the party is becoming smaller as Republicans are turned off and become independents as the party accepts the rhetoric of Trump, QAnon and its acolytes like Greene.
“The more that happens, the more people will continue to leave the party,” Gutierrez said. “They were all very much in line with Trump, and I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how they can detach themselves from Trump without losing support.”
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