I presume that most Jews would wish that someone other than Ilhan Omar represented the 5th district of Minnesota in the U.S. House of Representatives. As Farley Weiss points out in his editorial last week, “Voting Against an Antisemite Should Be an Easy Decision” (February 2, 2023), statements by Omar and her colleague Rashida Tlaib were part of the impetus for the House, last year, to overwhelmingly pass Resolution 183, which condemned antisemitism. The problem, I think, is that Mr. Weiss is addressing the wrong audience when he calls for the members of the House to remove her from her committee assignments. He’s missing the point. The point is that the voters in Minnesota should not want to be represented by her, and that is a case to be made to them. They should choose someone else.

Unfortunately, the voters in Minnesota indeed chose Omar in 2018, 2020, and again in 2022, with more than 75 percent of the vote in a safe Democratic district. What Mr. Weiss and other like-minded people should have done, and perhaps ought to do going forward, is support her primary opponent, Don Samuels, who almost beat her this past time, garnering 48 percent of the primary vote only to be narrowly defeated.

And this is why most Democrats and a few Republicans see the fight to remove Omar from committees as akin to the successful effort to remove Marjorie Taylor Green in the last session. Both women have said highly objectionable, dangerous, hateful things But neither has broken any federal laws that might endanger their congressional tenure, and therefore, in both cases those who object to them should attempt to defeat them at the ballot box. Unfortunately, the voters in Georgia like Green almost as much as the ones in Minnesota like Omar, and she won her last election with about 66 percent of the vote. Even worse, Green won her primary by even more, receiving 70 percent of the vote. So when Green was removed from her committees in the last session, it was troubling even to those who justly find her odious because it was silencing a duly elected representative.

Our Congressman, Josh Gottheimer, offers another reason why perhaps Ms. Omar should not be treated the same as Ms. Green. He argues that she has demonstrated a capacity to grow, as evidenced by her co-sponsorship of Resolution 92 in the current Congress, recognizing Israel as a U.S. ally and condemning antisemitism. One may disagree with Gottheimer’s assessment, but I still argue that the forum for that debate should be the 5th District of Minnesota, not the halls of Congress. As Mr. Gottheimer said: “Removing a Member of Congress for inciting violence is appropriate. However, removing a member for having different viewpoints—even ones I strongly oppose—violates the entire basis of our democracy.”