Marjorie Taylor Greene fined third time for refusing to wear mask on House floor

A Georgia Republican who compared rules on mask-wearing against Covid-19 to the Holocaust and another who said Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol on 6 January behaved like “normal tourists” have been fined for failing to wear masks on the floor of the House.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, who apologised for the Holocaust comparison in June, and Andrew Clyde, who made his claim about the rioters in May, were fined by the House ethics committee on Monday.

The House mask mandate was introduced last year, lifted in June then re-applied in July, to Republican protests.

First offences merit a warning, second offences attract a $500 fine and subsequent offences are fined $2,500.

Greene had already been fined twice for failing to wear a mask. On Monday, she said: “I’m taking a stand on the House floor because I don’t want the people to stand alone.”

The committed conspiracy theorist and partisan bomb thrower has relentlessly courted controversy since her election last year. In February, she was stripped of committee assignments.

She compared House Covid-19 rules to “a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star … put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.

Apologising, she said she was “truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust” and had visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“There’s no comparison and there never ever will be,” she said.

Clyde did not immediately comment about his mask fine. It was reported in July that the navy veteran and gun store owner had changed the structure of his congressional pay, as a way to avoid fines over masks and bypassing metal detectors during security checks.

Clyde made his infamous comment about the 6 January Capitol attack, around which five people died as supporters of Donald Trump attempted to overturn the election, in May.

Though he said “an undisciplined mob” had been at the Capitol, and “there were some rioters and some who committed acts of vandalism”, Clyde downplayed the events of the day.

“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos and pictures,” Clyde said.

“You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from 6 January, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

Some rioters looked for lawmakers, including the then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to kidnap and possibly kill. As the Washington Post reported, pictures from 6 January show Clyde among representatives rushing to barricade a door to the chamber, lest rioters break in.

Michael Fanone, a police officer injured in the riot, later said Clyde “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward” when approached for comment on Capitol Hill.