The US House of Representatives is preparing to vote on a resolution to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the Foreign Affairs Committee as soon as Wednesday after Republicans found a way to bring a key GOP holdout on board, Axios reports.
According to the report, the Rules Committee met Tuesday evening to consider the resolution kicking Omar off committees, slating it for a vote in the House as soon as this week.
The meeting comes after Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN), who had been one of three Republicans planning to vote no, said Tuesday that she will vote for the resolution after it added language that allows members to appeal their removals from committees.
“I appreciate Speaker McCarthy’s willingness to address legitimate concerns and add due process language to our resolution,” she said in a statement.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Axios that Republicans have the votes.
The text of the resolution says that "any Member reserves the right to bring a case before the Committee on Ethics as grounds for an appeal to the Speaker of the House for reconsideration of any committee removal decision."
McCarthy is seeking to block Omar from the committee due to her criticisms of Israel and its government.
Omar came under fire in 2019 after she suggested on Twitter that Republicans were attacking her at the behest of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
She subsequently issued a half-hearted apology before ultimately deleting the controversial tweets.
In another incident, Omar shared to Twitter a video of a conversation she had with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which she appeared to compare Israel and the United States to Hamas and the Taliban.
After 12 of the 25 Jewish Democrats in the US House of Representatives published a statement criticizing Omar’s assertion, she fired back at her Jewish colleagues and said, “It’s shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for ‘clarification’ and not just call.”
She later issued another clarification and claimed she had been misunderstood.
Asked earlier this week about her past antisemitic statements, Omar told CNN that she was not aware that her comments could be viewed as antisemitic.
She accused Republicans of Islamophobia, claiming, "It is politically motivated, and in some cases motivated by the fact that many of these members don't believe a Muslim refugee, an African, should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee."