In the early days of 2023, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was riding high. She had gone from the fringe of the House Republican Caucus to being a key ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., with her choice of committee assignments and a finger on the scale setting the GOP’s agenda. But her time as a power broker was as short-lived as McCarthy’s reign.
Since McCarthy’s downfall, Greene has been on a bit of a tear, flailing about and lashing out at other Republicans as she tries to regain her standing as an avatar of the MAGA movement. The Washington Post on Monday framed Greene’s behavior as her being back to her old self, but the truth is a bit more unfortunate for her. As she nears the halfway point of her sophomore term, Greene is more isolated than ever — and an attempt to win back her former status seems unlikely to work twice.
The version of Greene that arrived in Congress in 2021 had a chip on her shoulder, not least because Republican leadership had condemned her conspiracy theory-touting before she’d even been elected. But she entered the House as a MAGA favorite and quickly found her people among the House Freedom Caucus. Greene proved to be a perfect foil for House Democrats and the newly installed Biden administration and a major headache for McCarthy and other Republican leaders.
Greene went further, though, offering to exchange her cachet among the far right for proximity to power.
But the tide began to turn as the cash began to roll in for Greene. Even though she held an entirely safe seat, she raised an incredible $3.2 million in the first three months of her freshman year. Soon, she was touted as a headliner at GOP fundraising events around the country. That she had been removed from her committee assignments for speaking at a white nationalist conference left her with even more time to raise money — a language that McCarthy, another top fundraiser, spoke well.
It was that acknowledgment of Greene’s popularity that bonded her and McCarthy’s fates together. Last year’s midterm election results left McCarthy with a narrow majority. And the caucus’ right flank almost immediately leveraged the slim margin for victory in the pending speaker election to pressure McCarthy for concessions.
Greene went further, though, offering to exchange her cachet among the far right for proximity to power. McCarthy in turn saw her as a potential shield against former President Donald Trump’s supporters. Even as others on the far right twisted the knife over 15 votes, Green vocally backed McCarthy’s bumpy path to the speakership; in turn, he gave her seats on the House Oversight Committee and a subcommittee focused on the Covid-19 pandemic. Later that year, Greene stood by McCarthy in the face of backlash to his debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden; McCarthy called her “one of the strongest legislators” in the House.
This transactional politicking — a staple of McCarthy’s career — left her more anti-establishment colleagues uncomfortable. And in classic teen movie style, once the weirdo from the fringe had found herself at the popular kids’ table, she started to view herself as no longer needing her old friends. The last straw was in June, when she called Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., a “little b----” on the House floor. Within the next month, Greene saw herself officially kicked out of the Freedom Caucus for her attacks on her fellow ultraconservatives. At the time, she said she preferred being a “free agent” anyway. And why not? She still had the ear of the speaker, who was pushing forward with the baseless impeachment of Biden that she had been pushing.
But then McCarthy’s star began to fall, then plummet, as he was removed from the speakership in a spasm of rage from Greene’s onetime allies.
Greene has definitely started operating as a lone wolf chaos agent again,
Since then, Greene has definitely started operating as a lone wolf chaos agent again, pushing a censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., (which failed) and forcing consideration of a resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (which was sent to committee before a full vote could happen). Her fury at those failures has been directed at other Republicans for not standing with her. As The Daily Beast reported this month, that hasn’t gone over well with basically anyone else with an R next to their name: “There is no one I have heard from, dozens of members, who are happy with her, that trust her [or] confide in her,” an unnamed Republican told The Daily Beast. “I have cut ties completely.”
Still, given that the new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., is a fellow MAGA conservative, you’d think that this could all have worked out for Greene. And it’s not like she has no influence at all without McCarthy at the helm. She has kept up the pressure on Johnson to support the entirely bogus impeachment process after reports arose that he wasn’t really feeling it. She was also one of the loudest voices pushing him to release thousands of hours of Capitol security camera video taken on Jan. 6, 2021, which Johnson announced last week he would do.
But the Freedom Caucus has already shown Johnson more leeway than it ever granted McCarthy, even as it expressed displeasure with his decision to keep the government open without extracting deep spending cuts. The business agreement that McCarthy and Greene forged was one in which both stood to gain. The simple fact is, though, that Johnson doesn’t need Greene hanging around to give him cred among the MAGA weirdos — he has already brought his own. Without that leverage, and with so many bridges burned, Greene is more marginalized than ever.
