House Speaker Mike Johnson won’t commit to taking any disciplinary action against Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar for her comments blaming Charlie Kirk for his own assassination, despite his power to strip her of committee assignments or put forward a resolution calling for her expulsion from Congress.
In a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation, Johnson decried the danger of name-calling. “I mean calling people Nazis and fascists is not helpful,” Johnson said. “Look, there are some deranged people in society, and when they see leaders using that kind of language so often now, increasingly, it spurs them onto action. We have to recognize that reality and address it appropriately.”
But Johnson didn’t offer details Sunday about what an appropriate response looks like, even though he has a responsibility to respond to the ugly statements Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., made during an interview on the Mehdi Hasan podcast while discussing the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“There are a lot of people who are out there talking about [Kirk] just wanting to have a civil debate,” Omar said.
“It’s bullsh-t! A complete rewriting of history,” Hasan interjected.
“Yeah, there is nothing more effed-up, you know, like than to completely pretend his words and action have not been recorded. … You have people like Trump, who has incited violence against people like me. And so, you know, these people are full of sh-t, and it’s important for us to call them out.”
Hasan agreed that people on the right are “are full of sh-t, and we reserve the right to call them out, even in a time of tragedy and tension like this.”
Johnson did respond to Omar’s comment on Fox News Sunday.
“She clearly has no idea what she’s talking about. She has not followed Charlie. She’s playing into this characterization of him that the left has been advancing. There are people actually celebrating his murder online, and that tells you everything you need to know about that side,” Johnson said. He added, “We’ve got to turn the rhetoric down. That is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing, what you just saw in that video right there.”
But that can’t be the end of his response. Johnson must do something more than make a few gentle comments on Sunday morning television.
The Federalist asked his office Monday if Johnson planned to make a move beyond words, but by the end of the day, the Speaker’s office had offered no plan.
Yet online, the appetite from public posters for Republican leadership to do something about Omar’s rhetoric is gathering steam.
Omar and Hasan continued to turn up the temperature in their conversation, both complaining President Donald Trump took away former Vice President Kamala Harris’s taxpayer-funded security. They did not mention that Harris enjoyed Secret Service protection longer than other vice presidents — 18 months instead of the traditional six months, as The Federalist’s Breccan Thies previously reported.
“They’re willing to actually take away the security and the safety of people like VP Harris, because they don’t mind — they don’t mind her getting killed,” Omar said. “And that is the reality in which we are living in and we have to continue to talk about, because unless we all collectively make a decision that this is not normal, and that we are going to actually be civil, you know, this is going to continue.”
“One hundred percent,” Hasan agreed.
Imagine how the false claim that Republicans (the pro-life folks) don’t care if people are killed would sound to a mentally unstable person with a weapon. This is precisely the dangerous messaging that must be addressed.
The interview went on, with Omar and Hasan apparently ignoring reports that bullets with leftist messages had been found and complaining that the left was being blamed for the shooting before the killer had been identified.
“[The right] want to point the finger, because, to them, they don’t really care about the life that is lost,” Omar said. “It’s about who I can demonize, and that demonization is what leads to lives being taken. And I want them to realize that they can’t continue to set the fires that end up consuming them and cry about it.”
With that final line, Omar essentially blamed Kirk for his own death: He said things she didn’t like, so no one can cry when he is brutally martyred.
The day after Kirk was assassinated, Omar reposted a video from another user on X that said Kirk was a “reprehensible human being. He enacted his political agenda by preying upon weak-minded people.” The video smear Kirk as a “stochastic terrorist and adamant transphobe.”
“With his last dying words, he was spewing racist dog whistles. Charlie Kirk was Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster shot him through the neck,” the video Omar aligned herself with said. “We can both denounce this violence and also realize that Kirk and his ilk’s rhetoric are why it happens. And you can see this rhetoric continuing after his death. Far-right extremists are clogging social media, practically begging to use his death as an excuse to enact massive retributory violence against Democrats, or liberals, or leftists. They are looking for any excuse to justify their desire to kill their opposition.”
Omar’s comments and posts in recent days demand a vigorous response from Speaker Johnson.
Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. put forward a resolution Monday to remove Omar from the House Budget Committee and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. This should have come from the Speaker’s office.
Omar has already faced multiple censure resolutions for her speech in previous years, and it has done nothing to cool her antagonistic voice. Congressional Republicans put one censure measure forth in response to Omar suggesting that some Jewish students at Columbia University were “pro-genocide.” Before that, she faced censure for making antisemitic comments, such as in a 2012 social media post in which she said, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
In 2023, the House voted to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, a punishment she described as a victory on her website.
Ilhan Omar has not changed, and neither have House Republicans, who have done virtually nothing to hold her accountable for her outrageous rhetoric. It would take a two-thirds vote to expel her from Congress. Her district has been overrun by immigrants, many of whom are from Somalia. She is the only politician who speaks their language and advocates for their home country, so she won’t be voted out any time soon.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
