Resistance from Within

Spectator

It must be difficult to lead when those you hope will follow demand you agree with them 100 percent of the time.

That’s the predicament Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finds himself in after having had the temerity to usher through the House a bill providing, among other things, aid to Ukraine and Israel. Surprisingly, there are now Republicans who favor Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to the detriment of the Ukrainians he has invaded.

The leader and loudest of this group is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has represented Georgia’s 14th congressional district since 2021. Greene has threatened to “vacate” Speaker Johnson (remove him from his position as Speaker) because, she says, he has “betrayed” Republicans and should be replaced. One has to assume the betrayal she references was Johnson’s decision to favor Ukraine over Russia and Israel over Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Maybe we should remind ourselves of the ideas and policies Representative Greene purports to endorse and support.

She was CFO of the family construction business her father started, though according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she didn’t show up that often. She eventually left that business and opened her own CrossFit gym. She had plenty to say before entering politics, but one of the highlights had to be her suggestion that Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, should be arrested and summarily executed.

Once elected, Greene became ever more extreme and bizarre (as if advocating for the summary execution of elected officials wasn’t bizarre enough). She has openly compared Democrats to Nazis and compared COVID-19 mitigation efforts to the persecution of Jews. Alas, she was just getting started.

Greene is a strong believer in so-called white replacement theory, the quite offensive notion there is a plan afoot to replace white Americans with non-white immigrants orchestrated, as you might have guessed, by “left-wing Socialists” and financed by the always conspiring George Soros. (There’s no actual evidence any such thing exists.)

Greene describes herself as a Christian nationalist and has suggested other religions should not receive the same First Amendment protections. She spewed birther rhetoric when that was popular among conspiracy theorists with whom she usually agrees. She has said she believes our government has been involved in mass shootings and that our government and maybe Israel were complicit in the horrors of 9/11. She has repeated, then retracted, then re-repeated more than one QAnon conspiracy, including the truly noxious Pizzagate nonsense in which the conspiratorialists allege Democrats, movie stars, and rich elitists abducted, tortured, raped, killed, and cannibalized children. She even suggested at one point that wildfires devastating California might have been started by “space solar generators,” then added a common antisemitic trope implying it was all funded by the Rothschild family

She is the truest of MAGA true-believers, latching onto every election-related conspiracy and fraud theory no matter how far fetched. (Our favorite was that voting machines allegedly set up to ensure the re-election of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, were used to help elect Biden.) She even went so far as to assert the Georgia elections, despite recounts and audits, should be invalidated. No, wait…not her congressional race or any other won by a Republican.

She refused to condemn or even criticize the riots of Jan. 6 and has called those arrested for breaching the Capitol and committing acts of violence as either “political prisoners” or “hostages.” She was booted from her committee assignments in late 2021 for advocating political violence and was then expelled from the Freedom Caucus for insulting Rep. Lauren Boebert.

As a legislator, she has been pretty close to an abject failure. Of the 213 pieces of legislation she has sponsored or co-sponsored, exactly four she co-sponsored have become law. (Sponsors typically write the bills, or their staff does, while co-sponsoring requires nothing more than adding your name as a supporter to someone else’s bill.) Nothing she has sponsored herself has ever come close to passage. (To be fair, term limits for members of Congress, which Greene has proposed, may well be a constitutional amendment whose time has come.)

So, Greene believes and repeats nonsense, supports election lies, and likes almost all conspiracy theories. She is a remarkably ineffective legislator but enjoys yelling insulting interruptions when President Biden is trudging through his State of the Union speech.

Mike Johnson’s job is at risk even though he actually legislated, compromised, found common ground, exercised leadership, and a majority of Congress believed he did the right thing. Marjorie Taylor Greene threatens yet another purge, anyway, because she didn’t get her way. Democrats aren’t above exploiting the split, but the strongest resistance to Speaker Johnson may come from within his own party. Election year partisan posturing is about to fully bloom, so good luck, Mr. Speaker.

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