She's Going To Lose Them Their Majority
In recent days, various Democrats wrote privileged censure resolutions for George Santos— Ritchie Torres (NY), Dan Goldman (NY) and former Republican Robert Garcia (CA)— and Marjorie Traitor Greene— Becca Balint (VT)— but the deadline to start the clock on any actual censure votes passed on Wednesday. If the Democrats wanted to force the issue before the House leaves for its extended August recess the two resolutions would have had to be presented 2 days ago. Apparently Hakeem Jeffries had other ideas.
When she announced she would offer a privileged resolution, Balint said, “I ran for Congress after watching on January 6th that anti-democratic messages and fear-mongering have real consequences for our democracy. Unserious elected officials like Taylor Greene make a mockery of our democratic institutions and derail us from the urgent work we’ve been tasked with. This job is about alleviating suffering and supporting our communities, and instead Taylor Greene uses her position as a megaphone for conspiracy theories and hate speech. There must be a counterforce that comes from within Congress. It begins with principled members standing up and saying we have had enough.”
Over 100 amendments were offered for H.R. 4366, the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The Rules Committee disallowed most of them. As far as I can tell, the member who offered the most amendments— all of them QAnon grade fucknuttery— came from Traitor Greene. She asked for votes on 7 amendments. On Wednesday Congress voted on 9 offered by Republicans and one bipartisan one on flood damage at West Point offered by Pat Ryan (D-NY) and Steve Womack (R-AR). The Ryan-Womack amendment came up first and sailed through 394-19, only the “Always Say No” Neo-fascists like Andy Biggs, Bob Good, Ralph Norman, Matt Rosendale, Scott Perry, Paul Gosar… etc opposing it. Because fascists hate the US Military Academy and are happy flood damaged some of the facilities and don’t want them repaired because… abortion or something.
As the day progressed, generally crazy amendments by Ryan Zinke (R-MT), 3 by Chip Roy (R-TX), Matt Rosendale (R-MT), and Michael Bost (R-IL) passed in largely party-line votes, something like 223 Republicans for and 211 Democrats against. But that isn’t what happened when the two crazier-than-usual Marjorie Traitor Greene amendments came up for a vote, one on behalf of Putin to cut funding for NATO and the other to cut funding for the office of diversity and inclusion. The Putin amendment came up first and it was defeated 347-83 with 137 Republicans voting with all the Democrats against her typical anti-American lunacy. Just 83 Russo-Republicans backed her, the usual suspects like Biggs, Boebert, Brecheen, Comer, Crane, Davidson, Donalds, Emmer, Gaetz, Gosar, Jordan, Massie, Ogles, Perry, Roy, Rosendale… the whole repulsive crew. George Santos, whose campaign was financed by the Kremlin, voted yes as well.
The second Traitor Greene that was allowed a vote, was that anti-diversity and inclusion nonsense. The GOP is far more in synch with her on that, of course, and it was expected to pass. It didn’t. It was defeated 227-224 with 211 Republicanos voting with Traitor Greene but 16 crossing the aisle and voting with all the Dems. Most of the 16 who voted against her are Republicans in swing districts who know that to be associated with her is toxic:
Lori Chavez-DeRemer (OR)
Anthony D’Esposito (NY)
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)
Thomas Kean (NJ)
Jen Kiggans (VA)
Nick LaLota (NY)
Mike Lawler (NY)
Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA)
Marc Molinaro (NY)
Mike Turner (OH)
Brandon Williams (R-NY) managed to absent himself for this series of votes, but the other Republicans in districts Biden won who took the chance to vote with Greene were David Valadao (R-CA), David Schweikert (R-AZ), Mike Garcia (R-CA) Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ), John Durate (R-CA), Don Bacon (R-NE), Young Kim (R-CA), Michelle Steel (R-CA) and George Santos (R-NY), who won’t be running for reelection anyway. NY Times: “In the years since Santos first ran for the House in 2020, he has become adept at finding ways to extract money from politics. He founded a political consulting group that he marketed to other Republicans. He sought to profit from the Covid crisis, using campaign connections. And he solicited investments for and from political donors, raising ethical questions. Santos has been charged with 13 felonies for misrepresenting his earnings, collecting $24,000 in unemployment while employed, and pocketing $50,000 he solicited from political supporters through what he claimed was a super PAC… [A] review of his political career found several previously unreported examples of how he sought to use the connections he made as a candidate for public office to enrich himself.”
Santos is a backbencher with no clout. McCarthy told him to keep quiet unless he wanted to be expelled and with the exception of a few outliers like Gaetz and Traitor Greene, no one wants to work with him or have anything to do with him. Most of his NY Republican colleagues, other than MAGAt Elise Stefanik, have called for him to be— at the very least— censured. But if he’s a backbencher, Traitor Greene is the exact opposite. She’s all over the place, calling the shots and acting as an intermediary between Mar-a-Lago and the House Republican Conference. Some say she hold’s McCarthy’s leash for Trump. And her brand of extremist politics has been transforming the the House Republicans in such as way as to put them on a very different page from the marginally more pragmatic Senate Republicans. Some far right House Republicans say they’re not afraid of a government shut down. Traitor Greene is not afraid of secession.
Democrats have noticed. And they’d like nothing more than to tie every swing district Republican to her. Yesterday, the Center of American Progress released the MAGA Scorecard, which measures every House Republican, all 222 of ‘em based on how frequently they’ve stood with Traitor Greene.
Will Ragland and Eric Coffin-Gould wrote that “[T]he MAGAfication of Republicans in Congress continues to metastasize at an alarming rate. Elected for the first time in 2020, leading MAGA extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has risen through the ranks of American politics at lightning speed, using the support of far-right media and activists to exert influence over the entire House Republican Conference— from its leadership to rank-and-file members. As the analysis below shows, 92 percent of the conference has voted with Rep. Greene more than 90 percent of the time in the 118th Congress through July 14, 2023, underscoring the extent to which Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are voting in lockstep with the MAGA movement. Despite her fringe views and extreme ideas, Rep. Greene has amassed unprecedented power to push legislation that affects the American people in radical new ways.
Just three years ago, House Republican leadership— including current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), who were then in the minority— were quick to denounce then-candidate Greene in June of 2020 when a string of racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic videos made by the now congresswoman were unearthed, including one in which she said Black people should be “proud” of Confederate monuments. Many Georgia Republicans in the House quickly endorsed her primary opponent, and one Georgia congressman reversed his endorsement of Rep. Greene soon after that story broke. Today, Speaker McCarthy counts Rep. Greene as one of his closest allies and recently went so far as to say that she was “one of the best members we have … and one of the strongest legislators. I support Marjorie Greene very strongly.”
Rep. Greene was “courted” and received significant financial support from the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) and its members. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)— deputy chair of the HFC, and founding member and former chair of the caucus— staunchly supported her through many controversies in both of her elections and in protests against the Biden administration. Yet, in July 2023, Rep. Greene was kicked out of the HFC for being too aligned with Speaker McCarthy. But recent divisions within the HFC over Rep. Greene’s alliance with House leadership are not the result of her moderating her views; they are instead the byproduct of a handful of conflicting personalities—not differences on policy. This analysis underscores that the ideology of House leadership and the average Republican member of Congress has shifted toward Rep. Greene’s extreme MAGA ideas and demonstrates how House Republicans have grown more tolerant of her unacceptable and unethical behavior.
Since House Republican leaders first denounced Rep. Greene in 2020, more has come to light about her past, and she continues to take increasingly dangerous positions. These include:
In February 2023, Rep. Greene seemingly called for a form of secession, saying, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states.”
In the past six months, Rep. Greene has introduced legislation to expunge the two impeachments of former President Donald Trump and start impeachment proceedings for President Joe Biden, several Cabinet-level officials, and the FBI director.
Rep. Greene has led an effort to defund federal law enforcement.
She supports a total ban on abortion and opposes rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans, at one point calling one of her colleagues, who is a rape victim herself, “trash” for supporting these exceptions.
In June of 2022, Rep. Greene proposed firearms training for children as one solution to the increase of school shootings, saying, “I think children should be trained with firearms. I definitely do. I think that’s very important” in response to a question after repeatedly opposing any form of restriction on firearms.
She continues to oppose support for Ukraine’s defense against a ruthless Russian invasion, recently proposing an amendment, which House Republican leadership helped bring to the House floor, that would have drastically cut funding for Ukraine.
Rep. Greene has labeled NATO “not a reliable partner” and called for the United States to withdraw from the 70-year-old alliance.
She has called for the passage of the Fair Tax, a bill that would create a national sales tax, increasing prices by 30 percent and hitting the middle class especially hard, while supporting tax cuts from the previous administration that gave tax windfalls to the wealthy and big corporations.
She has proposed raising the retirement age to 70 and converting Medicare into a means-tested voucher program.
In April 2023, Rep. Greene reiterated her claim that “Democrats are the party of pedophiles” in a 60 Minutes interview.
In early 2022, Rep. Greene headlined a white nationalist conference organized by Nick Fuentes, a former campaign adviser to Ye— formerly known as Kanye West— and an extreme anti-woman, antisemitic, white supremacist activist, who Rep. Greene called to be reinstated on Twitter as recently as November 2022.
She was removed from House committees in the 117th Congress for “a pattern of online activity approving of the execution of Democratic leaders and federal agents.”
Rep. Greene called the Parkland and Las Vegas mass shootings “false flag” operations, saying of Parkland, “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”
One week before her election to the House in 2020, Rep. Greene claimed that “the only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.”
She loaned her campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars after her then-husband’s construction company received a now-forgiven PPP loan worth more than $183,000.
One week after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Greene labeled her Democratic colleagues “the enemies to the American people” and said that “they will be held accountable.”
A decade ago, nearly any of these positions would have been disqualifying for a member of Congress. But today, they have helped make Rep. Greene the leader of the MAGA movement in Congress, and by extension, the House Republican Conference. As this analysis makes clear, the vast majority of the party’s rank and file are following her lead. The scorecard below outlines how often House Republicans have voted with Rep. Greene in the 118th Congress, along with some key takeaways.
These are the Republican incumbents who are the most vulnerable to defeat in 2024— along with the percentage of times they have voted in lockstep with Traitor Greene:
Andy Ogles (TN)- 96.7%
Anna Paula Luna (FL)- 95.8%
Scott Perry (PA)- 95.6%
Lauren Boebert (CO)- 95.3%
George Santos (NY)- 93.4%
David Schweikert (AZ)- 92.7%
Brandon Williams (NY)- 91.8%
Mike Garcia (CA)- 91.5%
Monica De La Cruz (TX)- 91.4%
Derrick Van Orden (WI)- 91.4%
Ken Calvert (CA)- 90.9%
John James (MI)- 90.3%
Kevin Kiley (CA)- 90.2%
John Duarte (CA)- 90.2%
Michelle Steel (CA)- 90.2%
Juan Ciscomani (AZ)- 90.1%
David Valadao (CA)- 89.9%
Jen Kiggans (VA)- 89.8%
Nick LaLota (NY)- 88.4%
Zach Nunn (IA)- 88.9%
Tom Kean (NJ)- 87.7
Don Bacon (NE)- 87.4%
Nancy Chavez-DeRemer (OR)- 86.8%
Marc Molinaro (NY)- 86.3%
Anthony D’Esposito (NY)- 86.3%
Mike Lawler (NY)- 85.1%
Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)- 69.9%
They concluded that “The MAGA shift in Congress among Republicans started as far back as 2010, magnified by the election of President Trump in 2016, and now supercharged by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s actions— and her colleagues’ acceptance and overt support of her extreme positions. The House Republican shift toward this MAGA extremism has been led and overtly approved by Speaker McCarthy himself. The result has been a more extreme agenda, which rank-and-file Republican members are voting for en masse.”
No mention of her showing her favorite Hunter Biden dick pics during a committee meeting. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Dem on the House Oversight Committee asking Chair James Comer, a crackpot himself, to “publicly reprimand” and formally condemn Traitor Greene for her superfluous display. “If Rep. Greene’s completely gratuitous and irrelevant display of pornographic images at our televised hearing does not violate the Congressional rules of decorum, then we have no rules of Congressional decorum. Comer and Greene have come up with a bogus excuse that Biden may have violated the Mann Act by supposedly covering the travel costs across state lines of women he engaged in sexual relations with, although there’s no reason to think he didn’t just pick up a local hooker around the corner. Traitor Greene, who was formerly known as “the blow job queen of Alpharetta” because she would suck anyone off who agreed to buy a membership to her gym, is claiming, without an evidence. that Biden was involved in human trafficking. Comer agrees that she was within bounds and said that “I hope Ranking Member Raskin will join me in asking the Justice Department about Hunter Biden’s Mann Act violations and why the victims’ rights have been ignored.” John Bresnahan, Max Cohen and Mica Soellner reported that last week “Hunter Biden’s lawyer filed an ethics complaint against Greene, asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to “condemn and discipline” her over the photos.”