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Republicans are furious at Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) after he was allegedly caught pulling a fire alarm before a vote to continue funding the government, and they have drafted a resolution to boot him from Congress.
His fellow New York congresswoman, Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, has authored the resolution to have him removed after some GOP members accused him of pulling the alarm to delay the vote, something that Bowman has denied.
“This is the United States Congress, not a New York City high school. To pull the fire alarm to disrupt proceedings when we are trying to draft legislation to AVERT A SHUTDOWN is pathetic…even for members of the socialist squad,” she said on X, formerly Twitter.
“This is the United States Congress, not a New York City high school. This action warrants expulsion & I’m introducing a resolution to do just that,” she said in another post.
Breitbart News reported:
Bowman’s alleged actions are being investigated by the House Administration Committee and the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) and elicited widespread condemnation from his Republican colleagues.
Rep. Lisa McClain is drafting a motion to censure Bowman, a serious but less severe step than expulsion. She said Bowman’s alleged action “is a felony, plain and simple. USCP had to waste resources investigating rather than actually keeping the Capitol safe. The House must hold Rep. Bowman accountable.”
House Speaker and California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy was among the most furious as he compared what Rep. Bowman did to the January 6 rioters.
“I think [House] Ethics should look at this but this is serious. When you think of how other people are treated, when they wanted to come in and change the course of what was happening in this building,” the Speaker said.
“I’m going to have a discussion with the Democratic leader about it. But this should not go without punishment. This is an embarrassment. You’re elected to be a member of Congress. You pulled the fire alarm in a minute of hours before the government being shut down, trying to dictate that government would shut down,” he said.
“What’s going through a person’s mind like that? But we will find the right ability to deal with this,” he said.
The New York Democrat insisted that his pulling of the fire alarm was not an attempt to delay the vote, which Democrats wanted to do at the time, but was because the door he usually uses to leave the building he was in, the Cannon House Office Building, was closed.
“I was trying to get to a door. I thought the alarm would open the door, and I pulled the fire alarm to open the door by accident,” he said.
“I was just trying to get to my vote and the door that’s usually open wasn’t open, it was closed,” he said.
House Administration Committee Chairman and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Bryan Steil did not believe the representative’s explanation and said to CNN that Bowman needed to be “far more forthcoming” about the reason he pulled the alarm.
“We know Jamaal Bowman pulled the fire alarm. Why he did that, it is pretty unclear. His initial explanation, that it was an accident, doesn’t seem to really pass muster,” he said to CNN anchor Jim Acosta.
“Steil also warned that if Bowman pulled the alarm to interfere with the House voting procedure – an accusation Bowman earlier told reporters was ‘complete BS’ – it would be ‘a serious violation of the law,’” CNN reported.
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also called for Rep. Bowman to be prosecuted as she posted a clip of herself talking to reporters.
“Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the Cannon building this afternoon and interrupted the official proceedings of the House as Republicans worked to keep the government open. I’m calling on the DOJ to prosecute him using the same law they used to prosecute J6 defendants for interfering with an official proceeding. The Democrats literally will do anything to shut OUR government down because billions aren’t going to their favorite country: Ukraine,” she said.
