Boom! Nancy Mace Unveils a Bombshell Plan to Force Ilhan Omar Out of Congress 1
WASHINGTON — Rep. Nancy Mace has spent much of the past year escalating her campaign against Rep. Ilhan Omar, pushing for immigration records, attacking the Minnesota Democrat’s record and advancing broader proposals that would tighten the rules governing who may serve in federal office. The confrontation has fueled a fresh round of speculation that Mace could soon try to force Omar out of Congress. As of Aug. 28, however, the public record supports a more measured conclusion: Mace has repeatedly sought investigations and sanctions involving Omar, but no new expulsion resolution targeting her has been publicly introduced this summer.
The distinction matters because the constitutional power to expel a sitting member of the House is extraordinary. One representative cannot remove another by declaration, press release or subpoena request. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution gives the House the power to expel a member only with the concurrence of two-thirds of those voting. That threshold is deliberately high, and successful expulsions have been rare throughout American history.
Mace’s most recent sustained fight over Omar’s immigration history began during a Jan. 7 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on fraud and misuse of federal funds in Minnesota. During the hearing, Mace moved to subpoena immigration records relating to Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, Omar’s former legal husband. Mace described Elmi as Omar’s alleged brother and argued that the records were needed to determine whether federal immigration or marriage laws had been violated.
The motion did not advance. Committee members from both parties voted to table it, ending the subpoena attempt at that stage. Mace responded by accusing Washington of protecting its own and continued to publicize the allegations in the days that followed. The failure of the motion did not amount to a finding in Omar’s favor or against her; it simply meant the committee did not authorize that subpoena request.
The underlying allegation is both serious and unresolved in the public record. Omar legally married Elmi in 2009 and later divorced him in 2017. For years, conservative activists and political opponents have alleged that Elmi was her biological brother and that the marriage was designed to obtain an immigration benefit. Omar has repeatedly denied that claim. Investigations by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, PolitiFact and other news organizations documented inconsistencies and unanswered questions in her marital and tax history but did not produce definitive proof that Elmi was her sibling or that Omar committed immigration fraud.
One undisputed irregularity did emerge from Minnesota campaign-finance records: Omar and Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 while Omar was still legally married to Elmi. The tax discrepancy was later corrected. That episode has helped keep questions about her marital timeline alive, but it is not proof that the 2009 marriage was fraudulent or that Elmi was related to her.
Mace’s January move also occurred inside a hearing focused on a very different subject: the sprawling Minnesota fraud scandals involving public benefit programs. The committee was examining alleged failures in state oversight and a series of schemes that have produced scores of federal convictions, most prominently the Feeding Our Future case, in which prosecutors say roughly $250 million intended to feed children was stolen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That context has sometimes led political commentary to blur two separate allegations — Omar’s immigration history and the Minnesota fraud prosecutions. They should not be treated as the same case. The Justice Department has charged and convicted dozens of defendants in Feeding Our Future, but publicly available federal court and Justice Department records do not show Omar charged with participating in that fraud scheme.
There are documented political and community connections that critics continue to scrutinize. Omar sponsored pandemic-era legislation that expanded access to federal child-nutrition programs. She publicly promoted food assistance at a Minneapolis restaurant that later became connected to the Feeding Our Future prosecutions. Her campaign also received thousands of dollars in contributions from individuals later named in the investigation and, after the scandal became public, redirected those contributions to local food charities. Those facts have provided material for Republican oversight efforts, but they do not establish that Omar knowingly participated in the fraud.
Omar, in fact, publicly called for answers about misuse of the federal nutrition money in February 2022, writing to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and condemning the alleged theft of funds intended for hungry children. Republican investigators in Minnesota have nevertheless continued to seek records and testimony about the policy environment that allowed the fraud to expand and about contacts between Omar’s office and people associated with Feeding Our Future. The political argument over those contacts remains active, while the federal criminal cases have proceeded separately.
Mace’s campaign against Omar also predates the January 2026 hearing. In September 2025, Mace filed House Resolution 713 seeking to censure Omar and remove her from the House Education and Workforce Committee and the House Budget Committee over comments Omar made after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That effort failed when the House voted 214-213 to table the resolution. Four Republicans joined Democrats in voting to stop it.
That episode is important because it shows Mace has already demonstrated a willingness to use formal House procedure against Omar. But censure and committee removal are not expulsion. A censure is a formal reprimand, while committee assignments are controlled through House rules and party structures. Expulsion terminates membership in the chamber and requires the constitutionally mandated two-thirds vote.
Omar remains an active member of Congress. The House Clerk currently lists her as the Democratic representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, with assignments on the Budget Committee and the Education and Workforce Committee. Her office has continued issuing press releases, participating in hearings and voting on legislation. On Aug. 27, for example, she released a statement marking the anniversary of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in her district. Earlier in August, she demanded answers from Homeland Security Investigations over the presence of an undercover agent outside one of her town halls.
Mace, meanwhile, has spent 2026 pursuing a broader accountability agenda that extends well beyond Omar. In February and March, she sought the preservation and public release of congressional sexual-harassment and misconduct records. In April, she publicly called on four members of Congress — Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Tony Gonzales, Cory Mills and Eric Swalwell — to resign or face possible expulsion based on allegations or findings involving misconduct. She later introduced an expulsion resolution targeting Mills.
Those actions reinforce an important point about Mace’s political strategy: she has not confined her demands for discipline to Democrats. Her office has repeatedly framed the campaign as an effort to impose tougher standards on members of both parties and to expose information she believes Congress has kept from the public. Supporters see that posture as aggressive oversight. Critics accuse her of using accusations, subpoenas and privileged resolutions to generate political attention before investigations are complete.
In May, Mace expanded the fight from misconduct to constitutional eligibility. She introduced H.J. Res. 188, a proposed constitutional amendment that would require representatives, senators, federal judges and Senate-confirmed federal officers to be natural-born citizens. The proposal is not an ordinary bill and could not take effect through a simple majority vote. It would require approval by two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states.
The current Constitution does not require House members to be natural-born citizens. Article I requires a representative to be at least 25 years old, to have been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years and to be an inhabitant of the state from which the person is elected. The constitutional design expressly permits naturalized citizens to serve in Congress once they meet the citizenship-duration requirement.
Omar, who was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a refugee, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 and has served in the House since January 2019. Under the Constitution as it currently exists, her foreign birth does not disqualify her from serving. Mace’s proposed amendment would change that rule prospectively if it completed the exceptionally difficult constitutional amendment process.
The text of H.J. Res. 188 does not itself expel Omar, invalidate her current election or authorize Mace to remove her from office. It proposes a new qualification for a broad category of federal officials. Because the existing Constitution establishes the qualifications for House membership, Congress cannot simply add a natural-born-citizen condition through an ordinary House rule. Supreme Court precedent has held that Congress may not exclude a duly elected member for failing to satisfy qualifications beyond those contained in the Constitution.
Mace followed that proposal with other institutional measures. In July, she introduced a resolution directing the House Administration Committee to revoke official recognition of congressional organizations that discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity or national origin. The measure was framed as an attack on race-based caucuses and became another example of Mace using House procedure to challenge long-standing congressional practices.
Taken together, the subpoena attempt, failed 2025 censure resolution, natural-born-citizenship amendment and other accountability measures explain why speculation about a new Omar ouster effort continues. Mace has repeatedly signaled that she considers Omar a legitimate target of congressional scrutiny. But speculation should not be confused with a filed resolution or an existing expulsion process.
As of Aug. 28, there is no publicly identified new Mace resolution seeking Omar’s expulsion from the House. There is also no public record of a successful committee subpoena obtaining the immigration records Mace demanded in January. If Mace chooses to escalate, she has several procedural options: she could renew an oversight request, seek a committee subpoena again, introduce a censure resolution, seek committee sanctions or introduce a resolution of expulsion. Each route would face different procedural and political obstacles.
An actual expulsion campaign would face the largest obstacle of all: the vote count. A two-thirds majority would require support well beyond a narrow party-line coalition. Even in a House controlled by one party, expulsion ordinarily requires members of both parties to agree that the alleged misconduct is sufficiently grave to override the choice of the member’s voters.
The history of congressional expulsions demonstrates just how unusual that outcome is. The House has used the power only in extreme circumstances, including disloyalty during the Civil War and, more recently, cases involving serious criminal or ethical misconduct. The Constitution gives the House broad disciplinary authority, but the two-thirds requirement makes expulsion a fundamentally different weapon from censure, committee removal or political condemnation.
Questions about conduct that predates a member’s election add another layer of complexity. Congressional precedent on whether the House should expel a member solely for conduct occurring before an election has been inconsistent, and the Constitution Annotated notes that the issue is not cleanly settled by House and Senate practice. That does not eliminate the House’s power to investigate serious allegations, but it means the timing and nature of any proven misconduct would matter in an expulsion debate.
The evidence would matter even more. Mace’s immigration allegations concern potential conduct that, if proven, could carry serious legal implications. But the public record currently contains an allegation, a complicated marriage history, a corrected tax problem and a failed subpoena request — not a judicial finding that Omar committed marriage or immigration fraud. No credible news organization reviewing the available evidence has established that Elmi was Omar’s biological brother.
The same evidentiary distinction applies to Minnesota’s fraud scandal. Feeding Our Future was real, massive and criminal. Federal prosecutors have secured dozens of convictions, and the case continued producing new sentences in August 2026. Omar’s political connections to people or institutions later caught up in the scandal are legitimate subjects for reporting and oversight, but prosecutors have not publicly accused her of taking part in the $250 million theft.
That gap between suspicion and proof is likely to define the next phase of the Mace-Omar confrontation. For Mace, obtaining authenticated immigration records or other official evidence could transform a political controversy into a substantially more serious legal and congressional matter. Without such evidence, a move directly to expulsion would give opponents a strong argument that the House was being asked to impose its most severe sanction on the basis of unresolved allegations.
For Omar, the continued scrutiny creates its own political risk even without formal charges. Her marital history has never been fully explained to the satisfaction of critics, and the tax-filing problem gives opponents a documented irregularity around which to build broader claims. Her connections to Minnesota community figures later implicated in fraud cases also ensure that Republican investigators will keep examining old donations, events and communications.
At the same time, Omar can point to the failure of prior attempts to sanction her and to the absence of a criminal case against her. Mace’s 2025 censure resolution was tabled. The January 2026 subpoena motion was tabled. Omar remains seated, voting and serving on committees. Those are concrete facts that stand apart from the louder rhetoric surrounding the dispute.
The conflict also carries obvious political benefits for both lawmakers. Mace is a high-profile Republican who has built a national profile through confrontational oversight battles and sharply worded public statements. Omar is one of the best-known progressive Democrats in Congress and a frequent target of conservative criticism. A clash between them reliably attracts national coverage, online engagement and fundraising attention.
That creates an incentive for every procedural move to be described in the most dramatic possible terms. A subpoena request becomes an effort to expose a scandal. A censure resolution becomes a threat to a career. A constitutional amendment becomes a possible route to disqualification. But the legal effect of each action depends on what Congress actually adopts, not on the headline attached to it.
Mace’s natural-born-citizenship amendment illustrates the point. Even if the proposal were motivated in part by frustration with foreign-born officials, it cannot simply be used as a shortcut to remove Omar. Changing the qualifications for members of Congress requires changing the Constitution itself. Until that happens, the controlling rule remains that a House member must be at least 25, have seven years of U.S. citizenship and reside in the state represented at the time of election.
Likewise, Omar’s presence in Congress is not contingent on avoiding political controversy. The Constitution leaves voters broad freedom to choose their representatives and gives the House a separate disciplinary power when serious misconduct is established. That structure deliberately separates electoral eligibility from punishment after a member has taken office.
If Mace does launch a new ouster campaign, the first question will therefore not be whether the two lawmakers dislike each other or whether the allegations are politically explosive. The first question will be what new evidence exists. The second will be what formal action Mace is actually proposing. And the third will be whether she can persuade enough members of the House to support it.
A renewed immigration subpoena would require committee support or another valid House process. A censure resolution would need majority backing if it reached the floor. An expulsion resolution would need two-thirds. A constitutional amendment adding a natural-born requirement would face an even more demanding path through Congress and the states.
For now, the most accurate description of the situation is escalation without expulsion. Mace has tried to obtain Omar-related immigration records, previously attempted to censure her and strip her committee assignments, and has advanced a constitutional proposal that would dramatically narrow eligibility for federal office. Omar has remained in Congress throughout those efforts and continues to perform the duties of her seat.
The next document could matter. A newly authenticated immigration record, a committee subpoena, a Justice Department filing or a formal House resolution could all materially change the story. But none should be presumed before it exists.
The bottom line is straightforward. Nancy Mace has clearly shown that she is willing to keep Ilhan Omar under intense congressional and political pressure. She has already used House procedure against her more than once and has proposed broader eligibility rules that would reshape who can serve in federal office. Yet there is currently no verified new Mace-led expulsion effort capable of forcing Omar from Congress, and the most serious allegations about Omar’s marriage and immigration history remain unproven in the public record.
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If that evidentiary picture changes, the confrontation could become one of the most consequential House disciplinary fights of the 119th Congress. Until then, the difference between demanding answers and removing a member remains exactly where the Constitution puts it: in evidence, procedure and votes.
