In Emerson’s 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” he wrote “If you strike at the king, you must kill him. He who dallies is a dastard; he who doubts is damned.” It’s since become a proverb that everyone knows, except, apparently Marjorie Traitor Greene, who seems to have dismissed the high stakes involved in challenging and opposing a powerful figure. Maybe that’s because MAGA Mike comes across as neither powerful nor vindictive. Or maybe she just didn’t understand that the idea that actions taken against authority figures should be decisive and resolute, as half-hearted attempts can backfire and result in negative repercussions, as may many Republicans are urging happen to her.
Johnson has three options now: the punitive response being urged on him by his colleagues, meant to send an unmistakable message reinforcing his authority and discouraging the Freedom Caucus from more of this kind of dysfunctional and nihilistic behavior. I have a feeling, though, that his natural inclination is to respond with leniency and Christian forgiveness to try to demonstrate magnanimity, to foster goodwill, encourage reconciliation and even defuse tensions and grievances within the conference. Some of his supporters are insisting that this kind of merciful response would absolutely be perceived as weakness and indecisiveness, emboldening the dissenters and encouraging further challenges to his authority. If I were a betting man, that's the scenario I'd put my money on, at least in part because Trump would never allow Johnson to take action against Greene and the handful other conspirators.
Greene is basically devoid of allies in the conference now. She’s almost taken Gaetz’s place as the most hated member among Republicans in the House. A report by Politico yesterday noted that MAGA Mike “hasn't publicly indicated that he'll punish Greene for her failed push, but the vast majority of House Republicans— exhausted with the constant chaos of their slim majority— are writing her off entirely as a bothersome sideshow. While there's little chance Greene would lose her reelection bid in November, her growing list of foes could mean a severely restricted future for the Georgia firebrand, at least in the House. ‘She's fundraising,’ one member, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said. ‘She's pissed off because she was friends with McCarthy and she missed the first vacancy, so she called the second vacancy.’ Greene has kept at least one major ally in all this, however: Trump. In a post on his social network, Trump disagreed with Greene’s tactics on the motion to vacate the speakership but quickly added ‘I absolutely love Marjorie Taylor Greene.’ Never mind that she had ignored the former president's own efforts to privately stave off her efforts.”
[H]er colleagues were taking every opportunity to publicly disparage her. When she came onto the floor to announce she was forcing the ouster vote, her GOP colleagues heckled and booed her. Democrats loudly yelled “Hakeem!” referring to the minority leader, who has an unusual amount of power this Congress given deep GOP divisions.
At one point, as Greene was speaking with a large scrum of reporters outside the Capitol after the vote failed, Rep. Brandon Williams— standing alongside his fellow New York Republicans— started yelling over her, saying: “Why do those losers get all of the attention?”
“Moscow Marjorie has clearly gone off the deep end— maybe the result of a space laser,” scoffed Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY).
Even Johnson himself, who has a reputation for his conciliatory approach and not seeking retribution against his members, got in an indirect dig at the Georgia Republican on Wednesday.
“Hopefully this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined 118th Congress,” he said. “It's regrettable.”
The Main Street Republicans, who are more establishment-minded and were furious with Greene’s effort to boot Johnson, went out of their way to bash Greene, speaking with reporters before and after the vote.
“Listen, all of us in life get to decide how we handle disappointment. You can be productive or you can be destructive. Taylor Greene is choosing destructive,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), chair of that group, said before the vote. “She is engaged in a failing act of political theater.”
Even some Democrats, who otherwise might have been glad to see GOP disunity, made it clear they're taking her antics personally. Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska, one of the more centrist members of the Democratic coalition, noted that the last GOP speaker fight called her back to Washington shortly after her husband died in a plane crash.
“This isn’t a game or a joke for us,” Peltola, who supported keeping Johnson, said in a statement. “There’s real work that needs to get done.”
Even outside Republican groups hammered Greene, pushing for a return to more stable governance.
“The MTG fiasco shows again why our party has a problem with unserious crybabies. These are people who grandstand, fundraise for themselves, and disrupt the GOP’s responsible governing agenda,” said Sarah Chamberlain, president and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership, in a statement. “We cannot keep repeating this juvenile nonsense every six months.”
Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney tried figuring out if there will be any kind of punishment, noting that “a growing number of her GOP colleagues are pushing bigger consequences for her and other rebels. Those Republicans are proposing to build specific punishments into conference rules that would be triggered if hardliners keep breaking ranks against leadership. Sanctions getting floated include arming the entire conference with the ability to force a vote on yanking their committees or even ejecting them from the conference altogether. The same consequences may also be on the table for Republicans who vote to block GOP bills from even getting to the floor— a once-rare show of discontent that has become increasingly popular on the House’s right flank. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if there are some changes on a couple of committees after watching that motion to table vote,’ remarked Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR).”
Frustration in the conference’s centrist wing has simmered for months, but it’s boiling over thanks to a growing concern: Greene hasn’t ruled out striking again, keeping alive worries among her colleagues that the Georgia Republican may well take another shot at Johnson.
And, more broadly, GOP lawmakers fret that the House could be stuck in a self-inflicted chaos loop that hobbles them heading into November— unless they course-correct.
“There is an extremely high level of interest, by a high number of members, to change the rules right now,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson...
He added that after Greene’s decision to force a no-confidence vote, he expects renewed GOP conversations about “what rules do we need in place for the House to function, period. … I am interested in anything that would make the House run better.”
So far, the public warning signs that she’s pushed many in the conference toward their breaking point aren’t fazing Greene, who has said she doesn’t mind retribution.
“They probably want to kick me off committees. They probably want a primary. I say, go ahead… That is absolutely their problem,” she said after Wednesday’s vote.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), her main ally in the ouster effort, was even more unbowed. He predicted that Republicans who opposed trying to strip Johnson of the speaker’s gavel were going to “take an ass-whooping from their base.”
There are plenty of reasons to doubt that Republicans could muscle through rules changes they see as necessary to protecting their majority. But more and more of them are fed up: Reps. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) and Tom McClintock (R-CA) both proposed during a recent closed-door conference meeting to remove members from committees if they vote against rules for debate. Van Orden and McClintock later confirmed their position to Politico.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) explicitly reupped those calls after Wednesday's vote, floating the ejection of Massie and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), in particular, from the Rules Committee— after they voted to keep Greene’s ouster push alive. Others have privately discussed the idea of expanding the Rules panel, with more Republicans to counteract those who have blocked bills from reaching the floor.
Members of the Main Street Caucus, in particular, were interested in building specific consequences into the rules even before Greene triggered her vote. Their push stemmed from their growing belief that Republicans are no longer united around what was once a constant of the majority: That you vote for a rule to get your party’s priorities to the floor even if you oppose the underlying legislation.
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT), in an interview this week ahead of the vote, recalled that former Speaker John Boehner gave him four core principles upon his arrival in Congress in 2015, with the first one being: Don’t vote against a rule from your own party.
“We now have people that routinely vote against the rules … so I think we bottomed out,” said Zinke, arguing that Republicans should honor Boehner’s edict.
“I would suggest an 80 percent rule. Oddly enough, what the Freedom Caucus has. If someone routinely violates the rules… then it should be the conference’s decision of whether he should be removed or suspended from committees,” he added.
But Republicans are increasingly acknowledging that they will have to wait until January to change their biggest procedural pet peeve: The ability of any one member to trigger a speaker-ousting vote. Given opposition from conservatives in their own ranks— who privately told Johnson this week that they didn’t support raising the threshold— they would need Democratic help to do so before 2025. And that is likely to come with too many concessions.
Still, Republicans pushing for broader changes are hoping that by giving the power to the entire GOP conference to pull members off committees, it would take the onus off of the speaker or GOP leader— and thus lessen the risk of blowback.
Even if they can’t formally boot Greene from committees, many House Republicans believe she’s isolated herself within the conference, on top of being voted out of the Freedom Caucus and losing McCarthy as her inroad to influencing leadership.
“She’s an island unto herself right now,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) said.
Still, Johnson is unlikely to heed the latest calls, having already warned that removing people from committees could backfire. Plus, conservatives believe he isn’t the type to seek retribution.
The speaker said that he talked with Greene and her allies on Wednesday night immediately after the vote and told them he isn’t holding a grudge, indicating he’s ready to move past the drama.
“They were some of the last to leave. And, I said, ‘You know what? I don’t carry grudges, and I’m not angry about this. We have to work together. And I want to work with you guys. And those ideas we were talking about? I’m still working on them. So I hope we can put this behind us and move forward,’” he told Politico in an interview.
Democrats I spoke with in the House all said the same thing: nothing will come of this, primarily because the Republicans don't have the political will to take any actions beyond wining to the media and because Johnson is too weak. And because everyone is always afraid of Trump's second-guessing anything they do. "Look," one Democrat told me, "what Trump wanted out of this is a move to defund the Smith investigations and that's something we'll be voting on soon... because Johnson never says 'no' to anything Trump wants.
Yesterday, Annie Karni, wrote about how Traitor Greene immediately pivoted to using her defeat to <> enhance her stature outside of Congress<>— since inside Congress she’s viewed as nothing but a self-serving “provocateur and subject of derision who appears to revel in causing huge headaches for her colleagues”— whining about the “uniparty.”
Karni explained that Greene’s goals in Congress have nothing to do with legislation or anything like that but “delighting her [QAnon] base and stoking anger on the right more than legislative achievement or political pragmatism... So even as it became clear over the last week that she would fail in her quest to depose the speaker, Greene saw an upside in insisting on the exercise. A vote would offer concrete proof that Johnson had made himself beholden to the Democrats… and that many Republicans were going along with what she regarded as a betrayal of the party’s principles. ‘I’m thrilled with the whole thing,’ Greene said in an interview on Thursday, sounding upbeat after her spectacular defeat. ‘Even the booing from both sides— I fully expected it.’ Even if Greene felt defeated or isolated, she would be exceedingly unlikely to acknowledge it. Her power derives in large part from her irrepressible attitude and her Trumpian instinct to double down rather than retreat in the face of failure.”
On Wednesday evening, center-leaning Republicans tried to create as much distance from her as they could, fearful that association with her theatrics would alienate voters in their districts turned off by the seemingly endless chaos in the House.
“All she wants is attention,” said Representative Carlos Gimenez, Republican of Florida. “Today, we shut her down. Our entire conference said, ‘Enough is enough— we don’t need to hear from her anymore.’”
Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, referred repeatedly to Greene as “Moscow Marjorie” as she dangled her threat to oust the speaker. “Moscow Marjorie has clearly gone off the deep end,” he said on Wednesday.
…“[Trump]’s not mad at me at all,” Greene said Thursday of the former president. “I talked to him plenty. He’s proud of me.”
Democrats, for their part, aren’t willing to let Republicans run away from Ms. Greene, the most famous Republican in the House, so quickly.
Justin Chermol, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said: “When the Republicans lose their majority in November, it will be because the so-called moderates let Marjorie Taylor Greene be their party mascot.”
And Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wasted little time in sending out a fund-raising email detailing how Greene “threatened to throw Congress further into chaos, crisis and confusion.”
Greene laughed off the idea that her actions would help elect Democrats this fall— the argument that everyone from Trump to Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, had used as they tried to discourage her from moving to oust the speaker.
“Republicans will turn out in droves for Trump,” she said…“Then they’re going to move down and see that RINO Republican they’ve elected time and time again— who didn’t impeach Biden, who didn’t do anything on the border— they’re going to see that guy and they’re going to cuss him under their breath and skip his name.”
…In 2023, Ms. Greene gave the maximum contribution in more than a dozen vulnerable House Republican races, including to colleagues who represent districts President Biden won in 2020, such as Representatives David Schweikert of Arizona and Mike Garcia of California.
On Thursday morning, Greene made it clear she wasn’t finished tormenting Johnson just yet.
“Speaker Johnson is the Uniparty Speaker of the House!” she crowed on social media.
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