Marjorie Traitor Greene has a list of demands if Kevin McCarthy wants her vote for the upcoming battle for Speaker, presuming the voters give the GOP the House majority next year. CNN reported today that McCarthy hasn't quite locked down the Gang Greene vote yet. She was a guest on Matt Gaetz's MAGA-fascist podcast, where she told him that "We know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference. He doesn't have the full support to be speaker. He doesn't have the votes that are there, because there's many of us that are very unhappy about the failure to hold Republicans accountable, while conservatives like me, Paul Gosar, and many others just constantly take the abuse by the Democrats." There's little "conservative" about Traitor Greene, a fanatic QAnon believer and staunch Nazi from north Georgia. That's related but very different from conservatism. In fact, Frisco, Texas-- not San Francisco-- is filled with actual conservatives who are very much not fond of Traitor Greene and who created and funded this digital billboard telling her she isn't welcome in the suburban town north of Dallas/Ft. Worth. The town spans Collin (51.3% Trump) and Denton (53.2% Trump) counties, where she plans to speak at a neo-fascist event soon.
Greene, who previously told reporters she would be laying out a list of demands to earn her speaker vote, mentioned some of the challenges that lay ahead in McCarthy's quest for the speaker's gavel. Among her demands, the Republican told Gaetz she wants fellow GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming kicked out of the House Republican Conference for serving on the January 6 committee, something McCarthy has so far resisted. She also said she has no respect for current GOP leadership.
The command from Greene comes amid frustration from some Republicans with GOP House leadership as McCarthy eyes the House leadership position. Trump's allies in Congress-- who have voiced increasing skepticism and frustration with McCarthy in recent weeks-- have already started to flex their muscles in the potential race for speaker, which is still more than a year away.
Depending on the party's margins, McCarthy could have a math problem if these Trump allies stick together. The House Freedom Caucus, which denied McCarthy the speakership once before, is comprised of roughly 40 members.
Some in Trump's orbit, including Gaetz and Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, have also teased that Trump should make a play for the speaker's gavel, a move that could be designed to put McCarthy on notice and remind him of the leverage that the MAGA wing of the party would have in a speaker's race.
Greene also wants to see moderate Rep. John Katko, a New York Republican and McCarthy ally, lose his top spot on the House Homeland Security Committee... 'Katko's not a Republican. He's a Democrat,' Greene said. 'Our conference and the NRCC needs to stop playing this majority-maker game.'"
Meanwhile, back in Georgia, the new gerrymander has put a diverse swath of southwest Cobb into Greene's district. "[T]he redrafting of Greene’s northwest Georgia district struck a particularly raw nerve. Greene bashed the new lines as a 'fool’s errand that was led by power-obsessed state legislators.' And Cobb Democrats fumed at Republican mapmakers who crammed their slice of Black-majority suburbia in with Greene’s rural district. 'It was a sneak attack,' said state Rep. David Wilkerson, a Democrat who represents the area in the state House.
Until this week, when state lawmakers approved a final version of the maps, Greene’s 14th Congressional District spanned a dozen sparsely populated counties in the northwest corner of Georgia. It was overwhelmingly white, rural and Republican. In 2020, President Donald Trump-- who lost Georgia and nationally-- captured the district by nearly 50 percentage points.
The new boundaries make it slightly less conservative, yet still a safe haven for Republicans. But instead of snatching parts of rural Haralson and Pickens counties, the new boundaries curl around exurban Paulding County to pick up portions of southwest Cobb that include Austell and Powder Springs.
They also just happen to be some of the most solidly Democratic, and most diverse, portions of the suburban county. The area is home to the first Black mayor in Cobb County and the launching pad for the county’s first African American commissioner.
“South Cobb doesn’t look like anything else in her district,” said Leroy Tre’ Hutchins, a school board member from the area. “We’re focused on tourism, entertainment and service industries. Whatever is going on in northwest Georgia has nothing to do with what’s happening here.”
Some local Democrats quietly acknowledge they wouldn’t have been so bothered if another Republican, such as U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, had become their new representative. But Greene isn’t a typical Republican.
Since winning the U.S. House district last year-- after moving from Atlanta’s suburbs to run for the vacant seat-- Greene’s history of racist and antisemitic remarks has come into sharper display, as has her long adherence to the conspiratorial QAnon ideology, which she has more recently disavowed.
Anthony Whaley of Powder Springs said he thinks Loudermilk can be “levelheaded and reasonable.” Getting lumped in with Greene, Whaley said, is like a “shotgun wedding or an abusive relative moving into my house because they have no place to go.”
...If there’s a silver lining for Democrats, it’s the prospect that Greene can be a motivational tool.
Some have already pledged to support one of the long-shot Democrats competing against Greene. Others hope it will help mobilize greater turnout to help statewide candidates next year, when U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock stands for another term and Stacey Abrams is expected to challenge Kemp.
“I don’t think Republicans realize what they’re doing,” said state Rep. Erick Allen, a Cobb Democrat running for lieutenant governor. “It’s not a scare tactic: We now have a real-life bogeyman to get people out to the ballot box in 2022.”
That’s what Audrey Allen, the longtime community activist, is telling herself. She noted how Cobb flipped from a Republican stronghold to a Democratic one in the past five years, and she said she’s committed to registering voters in 2022.
“You can only get so mad. You’ve got to set the anger aside and move forward. My new mission is voter registration,” Allen said. “And there will be a day when this district will go blue, and then we’ll say, ‘You should have left us alone.’”
Enough of Traitor Greene for one day? Well, you probably already heard about this but just let me remind you that on Tuesday the publicity hound from Georgia introduced a bill to award Kyle Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal for "protecting the community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) riot on August 25, 2020." She has no co-sponsors and the bill is just meant to generate publicity for herself in neo-Nazi circles. Matt Gaetz responded that "We are concerned that awarding Kyle with a Congressional Gold Medal will give him a big head during the internship with our office."
