This is getting ugly.
A reporter for The Guardian, Hugo Lowell, reported on Twitter on Monday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had been fined once again by the House Ethics Committee for her failure to wear a mask.
This would be Greene’s first fine for the year after she refused to wear a mask on the House floor. However, it is only the latest addition to her more than 30 fine tally that totals more than $80,000 in penalties. The total figures on the Georgia Republican’s fines were first reported in the New York Times, to which a spokesperson for Greene responded by saying that, “the American people have had enough and are standing up against these outrageous and unconstitutional policies.”’
Greene herself had said that she would continue her stand against authoritarian “Democrat mandates” on the House floor as she didn’t “want the American people to stand alone.”
The congresswoman has been rather outspoken about her opposition to the mask rule. According to Business Insider, Greene compared the mask mandate to the Holocaust in May 2021. However, in June, she would apologize for her comments before comparing President Biden’s calls for Americans to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to the Nazi regime in July of 2021.
At the time, Greene said that Biden encouraging people to get a vaccine that “is NOT FDA approved” revealed COVID-19 was “a political tool used to control people.” She also added that people did not need Biden’s “medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” continuing that people had a choice and that the President could not “force people to be part of the human experiment.”
Last year, the Georgia Republican also joined two other GOP representatives in filing a lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the lawsuit, the group challenged the fines for refusing to abide by the mask mandate. The lawsuit also argued that being on the House floor sans mask did not amount to disorderly conduct, since the action “did not disrupt the House’s operations or good order, nor is it otherwise unlawful conduct.”
