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“When you strike at a king,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously explained, “you must kill him.” Generations later, the phrase was tweaked and popularized on HBO’s “The Wire,” on which Omar Devone Little said, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
The point behind the sentiment, of course, was obvious: Those who take on a powerful authority and fail shouldn’t be surprised when the powerful authority responds in kind.
The maxim came to mind reading this Politico report on this week’s drama among House Republicans.
After Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s doomed referendum on Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership, a growing number of her GOP colleagues are pushing bigger consequences for her and other rebels. Those Republicans are proposing to build specific punishments into conference rules that would be triggered if hardliners keep breaking ranks against leadership. Sanctions getting floated include arming the entire conference with the ability to force a vote on yanking their committees or even ejecting them from the conference altogether.
It’s not exactly a secret that the right-wing Georgia congresswoman finds herself short on friends. This was true long before this week, but Greene has reached a new level of unpopularity within the House Republican conference.
Her colleagues all but begged her not to bother trying to bring down her own party’s House speaker — especially knowing in advance that Johnson would prevail — but she ignored them.
Now, it appears those same GOP members aren’t eager to let bygones be bygones. Even like-minded radicals appear to be abandoning her.
Complicating matters, Greene’s failed gambit comes against a backdrop of chaotic dysfunction in the Republican-led chamber, fueled almost entirely by the party’s extremist flank — whose antics have inadvertently strengthened the Democratic minority.
But what exactly is the GOP conference prepared to do about it? The Politico report suggested there are a variety of possibilities in the mix that would punish Greene and others in her shrinking camp, including the loss of committee assignments. (Whether Greene would see this as a problem is unclear, since she doesn't appear to do much in the way of committee work anyway. Democrats also stripped the Georgian of her committee assignments in the last Congress.)
While we probably won’t see any action right away. Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota added, “There is an extremely high level of interest, by a high number of members, to change the rules right now.”
Watch this space.