Marjorie Taylor Greene represents ones of the most politically backward congressional districts in America. It's in northwest Georgia, bordering backward parts of Alabama and Tennessee. Trump won her district 73.4% to 25.3%. She was elected with 74.6%. The 12 counties and parts of counties are all beet red. Democrats are not competitive in any of them-- not even almost competitive. She knows it and she knows she can get away with her insane extremism.
Her antics have hurt her in the House, where a bipartisan majority of Congressmembers voted to kick her off her committees-- but she could care less. Her QAnon attitude has won her followers, a media platform and more money than almost any other member of Congress!
Ted Lieu told me today that "Majorie Taylor Greene is not fit to serve in the House of Representatives-- hell, she isn't fit to serve at the House of Pancakes. Seriously though, she is truly dangerous and shows just how far the Republican party has fallen."
Yesterday, the whole House Republican leadership slammed her for her latest bout of anti-Semitism-- not about Jewish space lasers this time but for "repeatedly equating COVID-19 vaccination and mask-wearing rules to the Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II."
Even a spineless jelly fish like Kevin McCarthy felt compelled to speak out: "Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling... Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language."
Steve Scalise made a passing reference to not agreeing with her but tried blaming anti-semitism on Democrats. And the new House GOP Conference Chair, Elise Stefanik-- who had earlier voted to expel Greene from her committees-- tweeted early in the morning, no doubt in coordination with McCarthy, that "equating mask wearing and vaccines to the Holocaust belittles the most significant human atrocities ever committed. We must all work together to educate our fellow Americans on the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust."
Reporting for The Hill, Scott Wong noted that "none of the GOP leaders responded to questions Tuesday about whether Greene should be ousted from their 211-member House Conference, even after a new video showed her at a public meeting in 2020 saying she would not take down a statue of Hitler... Facing a barrage of criticism from both parties, Greene, a Trump loyalist and member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, doubled down Tuesday on her Holocaust remarks. 'Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star,' Greene tweeted."
I happened to be on the phone for former House member-- soon to be Senate candidate-- Alan Grayson. I asked him how he saw her Greene's antics. "Not wearing a mask in the midst of a pandemic when you’re around people in their late 80’s, like Don Young and Eddie Bernice Johnson, is reckless endangerment. I understand that people like Greene enjoy the taste of blood, but aren’t 500,000 corpses enough?" Other members were less kind. I'll withhold the name of the member who said this to me: "I am not giving that middle school scumbag a minute of my attention. She is vile." James Himes (D-CT), a senior Democratic leader said simply that "The Holocaust was a uniquely despicable calamity of planned industrialized genocide. Mask wearing is something we do to keep others safe. Representative Greene's comparison is ignorant and morally irresponsible, even by her own barrel-scraping standards."
"Hopefully," Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey told me yesterday, "her voters recognize that everyday MTG demonstrates she has no respect for them or the issues important to their lives."
I didn't speak to Adam Kinzinger, but Tal Axelrod reported late yesterday that Kinzinger publicly called for Greene to be removed from the House GOP conference. "You can’t stop somebody from calling themselves a Republican or declaring themselves a Republican. But what we can do as a party is take a stand and say you don’t belong in our conference. That’s what I think we should do. I think we should kick her out of the conference, prevent her from coming to conference meetings, benefiting from conference materials. And I’m not sure if that’ll happen, but it’s just going to continue this kind of stuff. It’s just mind-numbing."
Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi (D) is a straight-shooter and last night he told me that "It’s sad. It’s either a plea for attention, mean spirited or just plain ignorant. She is using our foreign adversaries tactics to sew civil unrest with misinformation."
In his Washington Post column yesterday, Aaron Blake noted that Greene "is reality, and Republicans need to ask themselves how much more of it they can take before they do something more severe. Because it’s clearly not working... [A]s far back as January, it was pretty clear in which direction Greene was headed. Many GOP members of Congress have tolerated the exploits of the more extreme elements of their party-- including Donald Trump-- in the name of cohesion. They’ve dealt with problematic members like former congressman Steve King (R-IA), whom the GOP ultimately stripped of his committees for questioning why terms like 'white nationalist' and 'white supremacist' were offensive. But Greene clearly either truly believes the bizarre things she says or views them as her ticket to political relevance-- or both-- and her provocations have been much more frequent just four months into her congressional tenure... Leaders like McCarthy need to ask themselves with every passing day how much worse it’s going to get before she forces them to truly do something about it. You can dismiss any of the above as isolated events involving an attention-seeking freshman. But taken as a whole, given the frequency just four months into her tenure, it’s almost impossible to picture this being manageable for the foreseeable future."