Police used a stun gun on two people, and arrested three attenders overall, at a town hall meeting hosted by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday.
Protesters repeatedly interrupted Greene during a town hall in Acworth, which is about 30 minutes outside Atlanta. One man, Andrew Russell Nelms, began booing Greene almost as soon as she began speaking, and was dragged out of the room by police officers, who used a stun gun on him, according to the New York Times.
“Bye!” Greene said repeatedly as protesters were escorted out of the room by police.
As ever, Greene mounted an ardent defense of Donald Trump, touting to constituents his plans to cut taxes and downsize the federal government while parrying questions about whether his administration would slice safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Police were kept busy removing protesters who interrupted Greene as she spoke, including one who, after the congresswoman praised how the Trump administration was bringing the full weight of federal law enforcement against undocumented immigrants, yelled, “How about the KKK?”
“I’m glad they got thrown out. That’s exactly what I wanted to see happen,” she said after the roughly hourlong event. “This isn’t a political rally or a protest. I held a town hall tonight. You know who was out of line? The protesters,” Greene said after the event, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Essence Johnson, the chair of the Cobb county Democratic party, said the protesters had been “unjustly arrested”.
“People are passionate now. They’re upset. They’re frustrated. They believe democracy is being taken away from them. They’re at their wits end,” she said, according to the Journal-Constitution.
There was an armed police presence for the event at the Acworth community center and access to the town hall was tightly controlled, with attenders having to write down their address to show they were Greene’s constituents and show ID at the door, the Georgia Recorder reported. There were also reportedly dozens of demonstrators outside the event.
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has urged Republican members to stop holding in-person town halls after facing demonstrations and heated questions at them. While Greene’s district is solidly Republican, the portion of it where she held the town hall is the most left-leaning portion of it, the Journal-Constitution noted.
Reporters were barred from interviewing attenders at the town hall and Greene did not take live questions at the event, but instead read prescreened ones, the Georgia Recorder reported.
