Marjorie Taylor Greene punished for being McCarthy’s ‘pawn’: Ex-GOP strategist

It wasn’t her much-publicized argument with a congressional colleague but rather Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s embrace of another House member that led to the far-right Republican from Georgia’s expulsion from the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, a former GOP staffer said Thursday.

“It's not so much that she's fighting with her colleagues; it's that she's become an ally of the speaker,” Brendan Buck said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight.”

“She and folks at home could be excused for thinking that the Freedom Caucus exists primarily to advance conservative ideas. They're conservative to be sure, but their bigger priority is screwing with leadership, I've seen that plenty of times, and Marjorie Taylor Greene has become not just an ally but a shield from a lot of conservative criticism of the speaker, and I think probably in the view of the Freedom Caucus, she's become a pawn of the speaker and at times, you know, it's not just supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker which she did, it is at times defending things like the debt limit deal,” added Buck, who clashed with Freedom Caucus himself when he served as a communications aide to former House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

Buck said that Greene has “at times looked like the serious one, which actually, I think says a lot more about the Freedom Caucus than it does about her. She is still a conspiracy theorist. But it tells you the kind of challenges that Kevin McCarthy is facing. They saw what happened and they haven't forgotten. They're just waiting until the next opportunity to strike.”

Wagner suggested that Greene’s expulsion from the Freedom Caucus could weaken McCarthy in ongoing disputes with the House’s most conservative members.

“Has he lost in the fact that she's been booted from the House Freedom Caucus?” she asked.

“I still think she'll be useful to him, but what ended up happening in the debt limit deal is she helped Kevin McCarthy make all of those people irrelevant,” Buck said. “The bill passed with a huge majority. You're really able to basically ignore the Freedom Caucus and they hate that. They hate being ignored…and they were able to pass (the debt limit deal) without really worrying too much about that, because they did have conservative cover, not just from Marjorie Taylor Greene, but people like Jim Jordan, who used to be one of our biggest headaches, was supporting it."

“And so in the aftermath of that, that's when you saw them lashing out.”

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