The Patriot Post® · Squabbling Republicans Blow It Again

House Republicans should elect Marjorie Taylor Greene as speaker and see how many incredible things she does with what will soon be a one-seat majority.

Greene, sometimes known by her initials MTG, is the GOP’s AOC, a performance artist elected to represent the people of Georgia’s 14th District. (Full disclosure: This author is a constituent who voted for her twice.) She’s a firebrand espousing populist conservative ideas, but her primary job, it seems, is drawing attention to herself. Every year, she does this by heckling Joe Biden from the audience during his State of the Union. This year, she came decked out in a T-shirt emblazoned with “Say Her Name,” a red sports jacket, and a MAGA hat.

One might argue that dressing like a carnival barker was treating the occasion with the seriousness it deserved.

She did serve a useful purpose. By heckling Joe Biden to “say her name,” Greene got the drug-addled president to attempt to say the name of Laken Riley, the young Georgia nursing student killed by, in Biden’s own words, an “illegal.”

Don’t get us wrong: Greene is talented at what she does. But what she does shouldn’t be mistaken for governing.

Democrats wrongly ousted MTG from all of her committee assignments in 2021, but she was also kicked out of the Freedom Caucus last year. Given that she has no interest in governing, however, those things actually make her stronger as the persecuted brave voice.

On Friday, she was at it again. No sooner had the House passed its $1.2 trillion spending bill to keep the government open — and we’ll have more to say about that in a moment — than Greene introduced a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, which lays the groundwork for an effort to oust Mike Johnson from the post. “It’s more of a warming than a pink slip,” she said. She probably spent more time crafting a slew of X posts bragging about having done so than she did reading the bill or preparing the motion.

To be sure, roughly six months after booting Greene ally Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, Greene and her constituents certainly have reason to be angry at the way things still happen in Congress. Johnson promised to bring regular order to the budget process but hasn’t done so. He also did not give legislators time to read the more than 1,000-page bill before voting on it.

That and many of the items crammed into the legislation are why 112 Republicans voted against it versus only 101 for it. Still, after the Senate passed the bill and Joe Biden signed it Saturday, the government stays funded, and 112 House Republicans can go home and proudly tell their constituents they opposed the monstrosity. Everyone’s happy, right?

Well, Mike Gallagher’s not. The Wisconsin Republican announced his early retirement from Congress last month and has now said he’s bumping up his exit date to April 19. As we noted up top, that will leave House Republicans with a temporary effective majority of just one seat.

What, pray tell, does MTG think Johnson is supposed to do with a bare-bones House majority, a Democrat Senate — lost by the blundering of her Georgia colleagues David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, and Herschel Walker, as well as assists from Donald Trump and MTG herself — and a Democrat in the White House?

Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican responsible for ousting McCarthy, didn’t offer much support for Greene. “When I vacated the last [speaker], I made a promise to the country that we would not end up with a Democrat speaker,” he said. “I couldn’t make that promise again today.” That’s a tacit admission that he and others have damaged the Republican majority.

We’d dearly love to see Congress return to constitutional order and priorities regarding spending. We’d be glad to stop the endless continuing resolutions and the high-stakes midnight showdowns to prevent shutdowns that Republicans always lose. Democrats will never cooperate, of course, and Republicans are busy fighting each other instead of Democrats. Unlike Democrats, Republicans don’t operate in lockstep.

Why was Johnson forced to rely on Democrat votes to pass a bloated spending bill? Because Republicans on the Rules Committee are bringing the bills to the floor via suspension, which requires a two-thirds majority. Meanwhile, 55 Republicans voted “No” on every spending bill in recent months. Just because Republicans aren’t unified doesn’t mean Mike Johnson doesn’t still have to govern in tandem with Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden.

In this bill, the GOP did manage to hang on to a bare increase in military spending and accrue some money for border security, but getting Democrats on board meant adding their priorities to the legislation, which drove off Republicans.

Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott summed it up nicely: “This is a crazy way to run the country.”

We don’t have a silver bullet for fixing the GOP, but the coalition runs a pretty wide gamut of ideological and practical approaches, and unity is pretty darn hard to come by. Most Republicans don’t enjoy the safe seat Greene does, either. She won her seat in 2020 with 75% of the vote, but that dropped to 65% in her reelection bid, which indicates that some of her constituents are growing a bit tired of her performance (pun intended).

We’re left wondering just how many Republicans would prefer to be in the minority because screaming that Washington is broken is a heck of a lot easier than fixing it.