Rep. Jasmine Crockett Says She’s Always Ready for ‘Hand-to-Hand Combat’

WASHINGTON – The confrontation between Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) during a House Oversight Committee hearing Thursday may have been inevitable.

Since arriving in Congress in 2023, Crockett has been one of the committee’s most outspoken Democrats. And Greene has been Greene, with her trademark stream of incendiary behavior, including a “fake eyelashes” jab at Crockett last week, to which the Democrat responded with her now infamous slam about Greene’s “pale blonde, poorly built, butch body.” .”

For Democrats, especially the newer members of the House Oversight Committee, Thursday’s hearing appears to have validated their strategy of aggressively mocking Republicans. Greene went personal, Crockett responded, and the chaos overshadowed the Republican Party-led committee’s push for contempt charges against the U.S. attorney general, with even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La. .), shook his head during the procedure. It was just the latest episode of what some are calling “failure theater” for House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).

“It’s a committee where you have to stay on your toes and be prepared for nonsense,” Crockett told JS. “I didn’t think I should be ready to be attacked in committee because of my whipping, but it’s that kind of committee where it’s hand-to-hand combat all the time.”

The daily struggle is a strategy, Crockett said. “We always look at it as if we are telling the truth, and we are on the front lines of democracy, because these are the people, they spread all the disinformation and disinformation and the Russian propaganda,” she said.

Republicans have controlled the House for the past seventeen months by lurching from one personality conflict to another, and they’re growing tired of Greene. Their collective shrug after Crockett’s dig at Greene shows how they’ve lost their appetite for governing through beef.

Crockett showed early willingness to fight on Greene’s terms last year. In March 2023, she and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), another outspoken first-term Democrat on the Oversight Committee, joined a Greene-led delegation to the DC prisonwhere Republicans condemned the alleged mistreatment of Donald Trump supporters locked up for rioting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s hard to refute the criticism of the DC Jail, a facility that at times lacks working doors and functional air conditioning, and where inmates sometimes die. But Crockett and Garcia emerged from their tour noting that the Jan. 6 defendants had their own unit away from the general population — and more.

“They have their own cells, they have access to laptops and tablets,” Crockett, a former public defender and attorney, told reporters outside the jail. “Coming from Texas, I’ve seen so much worse.”

A reporter asked why Democrats would lend their credibility to the visit at all. “I mean, there had to be someone willing to tell the truth,” Crockett said. And she appears to have had the final say: The oversight committee has not held a hearing or taken any other public action on the issue since members visited the facility last year.

Since Thursday, Crockett has been drawing praise for her counterattack on Greene. collecting various tribute songs on her social media feed and dismissing criticism that she, like the Georgian, had committed a humiliating personal attack. She says she only went there after Comer made it clear that Greene would face no consequences if she commented on Crockett’s appearance.

“I didn’t immediately react the same way,” Crockett said. “I basically sat there and tried to make the process work.”

Greene, a sports fan, may have been offended.

“I think my body is in pretty good shape, and I’m turning 50 this month,” she said later during the hearing. She has tried to show that she takes the comment to heart, and that she doesn’t mind “built and strong.”

Crockett has confronted other Republicans, including Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), after Mace alleged that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, flexed his “white privilege” by canceling a committee hearing in January.

“It was a spit in the face, at least from me as a black woman, to talk about what white privilege looks like,” Crockett said in an clippable C-SPAN moment.

In February, during a break in a closed-door interview conducted as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Crockett’s Democratic colleagues noted that the witness, a former Hunter Biden aide named Tony Bobulinski, had been strangely vocal and repeatedly suggested that other witnesses were liars.

Crockett put it more simply: “He’s completely crazy, okay?”

The impeachment inquiry has largely stalled, with Republicans failing to provide credible evidence of Joe Biden’s misconduct — although Greene found multiple opportunities during public committee meetings to show photos of the president’s son apparently involved in sexual acts with prostitutes.

Thursday’s committee meeting, where the verbal altercation between Greene and Crockett took place, was closely tied to the impeachment inquiry — Comer had called the meeting so the committee could approve a contemptuous citation against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to release recordings of Joe to hand over Biden’s statements. interview with former special counsel Robert Hur. The Justice Department has already given Congress the transcript of the interview, but Comer has claimed that the audio is needed to ensure that the president’s friends in the so-called deep state did not edit the text to promote his alleged corruption to hide.

It is not clear when the full House will vote on the Garland contempt resolution, although Johnson said it would happen “soon” and would likely pass. But the speaker said last week’s snub was a bad look for Congress.

“Decorum is an important principle to uphold,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. “We’re going to continue to try to advance that principle and we need people on both sides of the aisle to, I think, take the emotion out of it. We can have a vigorous debate; that is what this institution is built on. But you know, we have to treat each other with dignity and respect.”