Her latest attempt to knock off a House Speaker ran into the calm determination of Mike Johnson. How long can she stay muzzled?
The threat far-right hysteric Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene issued six weeks ago to force a vote to oust mild-mannered House Speaker Mike Johnson from his chair ended with a whimper Tuesday afternoon.
Early on, she had a chance to get it done in the more-chaos-the-merrier House Republican Conference that took down Kevin McCarthy after less than a year in the Speaker’s chain. But as the weeks went by, Greene kept screaming about Johnson being weak and outfoxed by Democrats. In the interim, other members had begun to lower their voices. Johnson quietly passed legislation, delaying a government shutdown, and sent a massive foreign aid package to the floor to send arms to Ukraine, knowing he would break the Hastert rule, the hearts of his nemesis Greene, and others in the Vladimir Putin caucus. But he did it, and it passed. Biden signed it. It’s the law, and no one was harmed making it.
It’s not that Johnson did it on his own but that the bespectacled misfit did it at all. As Greene kept after him, Johnson got smart and trekked to Mar-a-Lago to check in with the boss, who complimented him for “doing a good job,” enough of a pat on the back to signal MAGA folks in Washington to hold their fire. Michael Whatley, Trump’s hand-picked replacement for Ronna McDaniel at the Republican National Committee, made a face-to-face appeal to Greene to cut it out. While the 49-year-old Georgian shrieked that she, not the accidental Speaker from Shreveport, Louisiana, was Trump’s person in Washington, it didn’t matter. Her usual allies in the House Freedom Caucus lost their stomach for another fight. Back in their districts over the weekend, there was little sentiment for another bloodbath so close to an election, and voters were less upset over the arms vote than expected.
Monday, Greene met for over an hour with Johnson, her emotional opposite, in which he politely repeated his mantra that he was doing the best he could with such a slim majority. Her posse shrinking by the minute, she unleashed her usual righteous outrage in front of a bank of microphones, her special place.
