EXCLUSIVE: Marjorie Taylor Greene declares war on Republicans
WASHINGTON — There may be a new speaker in the House of Representatives, but he, too, must answer to the same old boss: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
While there’s growing frustration in some corners of the GOP over some of Greene’s head-turning antics — like when she declared an “Impeachment Week” over the summer where she dropped new articles of impeachment daily against cabinet secretaries and President Joe Biden — Greene told Raw Story in an exclusive interview that her Republican colleagues haven’t seen anything yet.
“Our party is basically ripping apart at the seams. We have an identity crisis, and so I'm going to work as hard as possible to shove these people to realize: either work for the American people with an America First policy agenda or get out and go home and retire,” Greene told Raw Story.
Greene’s presence on Capitol Hill remains considerable despite liberals dismissively mocking her and fellow Republicans on the House Freedom Caucus booting her after she called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) "a little b----."
She vows to continue using her profile and digital bully pulpit to pull her Republican Party further to the extreme-right. That includes Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
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“The whole reason I ran for Congress was because I was mad at Republicans,” Greene said. “The first two years under President Trump, Republicans failed us. They didn't repeal Obamacare. They did not fund the border wall that we all wanted. They didn't do anything about abortion. As a matter of fact, they funded Planned Parenthood. Republicans did that. Not Democrats.”
Besides having the ear and affection of former President Donald Trump, she also leads an online army with her 2.8 million X (formerly Twitter) followers.
Her campaign raked in $12.55 million in the 2022 midterms — more than two-thirds of which came from donations under $200, according to OpenSecrets, indicating incredibly strong grassroots support. Although Democrats dumped $16.63 million into her opponent’s coffers last year, Greene sailed to reelection, netting 66 percent of votes cast.
Even if she’s a headache to party leaders, she’s also become a brand within the GOP, and leaders know — and fear — it. Greene had Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s rapt attention, and now she’s flexing early in Johnson’s tenure.
“I ran for Congress to change the Republican Party, and that has been my goal the entire time — to change our party to reflect our voters,” Greene said. “Because Republicans run for Congress, they campaign, making all these promises, saying all these strong America First campaign slogans and ideas and policies, and then they get here and forget the very people that elected them.”
This week, Greene has been on a rampage against eight of her fellow Republicans who sided with Democrats in opposing her latest effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“We exposed four Judiciary members, four of them that voted with the Democrats to kill the Articles of Impeachment for Mayorkas,” Greene fumed. “Why? So they can shelf it back in their committee, where my articles of impeachment were already collecting dust.”
When asked if she hopes to move the members or to move their voters — Washington-speak for “do you support a primary?” — Greene said, “Yes, move their voters, so I certainly hope it does.”
“We're at a point in America where we're sick and tired and we're done, so if you want to work in Washington, you're going to be held accountable and that is what I intend to do,” Greene said. “I'm putting them to the test, publicly on record with their votes. Their voters get to decide if they want to send them back.”
‘Getting over her skis’
Greene may be a force, but she’s also causing unforced errors that are frustrating her war-weary GOP colleagues.
Before Congress left town until after Thanksgiving, Raw Story caught up with two of the eight Republicans who crossed Greene this week on her impeachment effort.
Requests for comments from the other six were not returned, but, even with all the threats flying, freshman Rep. John Duarte (R-CA) — one of the eight — says he’s not worried.
“I’m in a moderate district,” Duarte told Raw Story. “The only choice I get to make is who’s mad at me.”
Greene’s actions may rev up the base, but Duarte says it’s bad for the rest of the beleaguered party when she goes it alone.
“Yeah. The base doesn't hear these things in detail. They just know that eight members voted not to impeach Mayorkas, and they don't realize that it was one individual who thought it might be a good idea,” Duarte said.
Duarte accuses Greene of “getting over her skis.”
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“The privileged individual motion to impeach Mayorkas, which the base would love to hear — and I'm not against an impeachment — but it's got to go through the committee. It's got to go through regular order,” Duarte said. “We really want leadership to look at it and say, ‘this is a good idea’ and to make sure the impeachment articles are very carefully written.”
A couple weeks back, on Nov. 1, Greene offered a privileged censure resolution against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), which 23 Republicans helped defeat because it accused the Palestinian-American of taking part in an “insurrection” after she joined a pro-Palestine protest on the Capitol grounds.
Duarte says that measure failed to pass a simple common sense test.
“Calling it an insurrection, because they went through the security guards in Cannon [House Office Building]. I mean, come on,” Duarte said. “If you really want to work on something like that, work on it. Don't just draft up your own version of events and put it out there.”
Veteran Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) knows congressional antics. The 11-term congressman chaired the House Oversight Committee when Barack Obama was president — “this is not somebody who is serious about working on problems,” Obama said in 2016 — which garnered him and the GOP many sensational headlines.
But it didn’t get the party any legislative wins to hang their hats on.
Issa says, even though Republicans just recaptured the majority, it doesn’t seem like Greene wants to influence policy, even as she’s redefining politics as usual in Washington.
“Angry people come and go, but virtually everything that becomes law — particularly in a divided government — everything that becomes law ultimately has to have support on the other side. If we're going to impeach and remove anyone, we need at least 17 Democrats to vote for it,” Issa told Raw Story. “Isn't that the goal? To write something that clarifies when something's been done wrong?”
Issa and the other seven are outliers in today’s GOP though. Most Republicans — 209, to be exact — didn’t get the procedural protest against rushing a Mayorkas impeachment.
“What is the frustration? I don’t understand,” embattled Rep. George Santos (R-NY) told Raw Story. “I don't think it was a distraction. I think it was, you know, a sentiment of a lot of people in our country, and she put it forward. I voted for it.”
This is the reality TV era of the Republican Party, after all. One she’s helped define, and one she's set on redefining, if in her and Donald Trump’s images.
A lawmaker, but little law-making
Greene is the original sponsor of 18 pieces of legislation in the 118th Congress. Eight deal with impeachment. Seven are to impeach Biden and an array of members of his cabinet — from the F.B.I. director to the attorney general. The other is to expunge the first impeachment of former President Trump (even though legal experts say you can’t expunge an impeachment). None of the impeachment measures have been successful — unless success is measured in donations — and most of her legislative efforts have gone nowhere.
In the 117th Congress, Greene sponsored six impeachment measures. Besides one aimed at Attorney General Merrick Garland, the other five are all aimed at impeaching President Biden. One for his COVID-19 response. Another for tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One for (unproven) bribery. Another over Afghanistan. And one for “for endangering the security of the United States.”
If anything, it seems to Issa that Greene is using protest tactics usually deployed by the minority party.
“I must be honest, if I were in the minority and I wanted to bring an impeachment and get a vote on it, I wouldn't want it sent to committee. I would want to deal with it immediately,” Issa said. “I trust these chairman to do the right thing and do it thoughtfully. She serves on the very committee we referred it to. She has an opportunity to go over there and make a point of their due diligence if they're not doing enough.”
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As for Greene’s accusation that Issa and the others fail to meet her America First litmus test?
“I’m not a purist. I'm a pragmatic conservative,” Issa said. “I believe in an impeachment process that is considered by a whole committee and the committee staff, that's done thoughtfully.”
Greene’s also a pragmatist, of sorts. While she was treated as an apostate in some far-right circles for counting McCarthy as an ally during his 269-day speakership — the third shortest in history — Greene says she secured a seat at the head table where she transformed formerly fringe views into GOP orthodoxy.
“If you pay attention closely, when Kevin McCarthy was speaker, he was changing the way he was doing things, too, and I'll take some credit for that,” Greene said. “Actually, I'll take a lot of credit for that.”
After Democrats — along with 11 of her fellow Republicans — stripped Greene of committee assignments for allegedly encouraging the assassination of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on social media prior to her election and other inflammatory posts that her colleagues deemed dangerous, McCarthy reinstated her.
The National Republican Campaign Committee (or NRCC) has also leaned on Greene’s popularity with the far-right for fundraising.
Even though Greene took flak for sidling up to him, she’s proud she had McCarthy’s ear — and then some.
“I got the money for Ukraine taken out of the defense bill. I did that. With a Speaker McCarthy, I got an impeachment inquiry launched without a vote, and I'll take strong credit for that but I give him credit for that, too. He did it,” Greene continued. “And in the past few weeks, the base has been extremely disappointed to hear our new speaker back away from impeachment as if he doesn't support it or go back and forth on the issue. That's a failure. We can't have that.”
Greene’s allies aren’t just nameless masses of digital followers. Freshman Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) met Greene in his successful outsider Senate campaign — through Tucker Carlson, no less — and now he counts her a “friend.”
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“She's much smarter than people give her credit for, and I think she's quite an effective operator,” Vance told Raw Story. “She’s gonna be an important voice in the party for a long time.”
Greene’s often called the right’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — MTG and AOC — but there’s a key difference between the far-right bomb thrower and the progressive thorn in Democratic leader’s sides: Greene is “much closer to [former President Donald Trump] than AOC is to Biden.”
“I think she's much different in that, her ears are much closer to the Republican grassroots than AOC’s are to — obviously it's not my party — but my sense is AOC represents a very narrow slice of the Democratic Party,” Vance said. “I think MTG actually has a much broader base.”
Broader, maybe, but Greene’s a small tent Republican, unlike the party’s former standard bearer, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).
Romney tried to broaden the tent and make conservatism attractive to independents, (binders full of) women and minorities. It seems Greene and Co. are doing all they can to cram more people into their increasingly smaller tent.
“I'm in a different branch of the party than she is. I wish her branch would get smaller and mine would get larger, but it's been going in the opposite direction,” Romney told Raw Story.
Whether AOC or MTG, Romney bemoans the loss of a bygone era where sound policy and party unity mattered more than antics — and the millions in small dollar donations they attract.
“What happens is that the most extreme person who lights their hair on fire is the one that gets the headlines and characterizes one's party,” Romney told Raw Story. “That's a problem.”