Greene to push far-right agenda
After committee ouster, GOP lawmaker standing by Trump
WASHINGTON — A fiery Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said Friday that the House’s decision to remove her from her committee assignments has liberated her to build a political network aimed at supporting former President Donald Trump and pushing the GOP further to the right.
“Going forward, I’ve been freed,” she said. “I have a lot of free time on my hands, which means I can talk to a whole lot more people all over this country and … make connections and build a huge amount of support that I’ve already got started with.”
Asked about how she saw her role, Greene said she planned to “vote very conservative” and use her influence to cement Trump’s imprint on the GOP: “I’m going to be holding the Republican Party accountable and pushing them to the right.”
The House voted 230 to 199 Thursday to remove Greene from the Budget Committee and the Education and Labor Committee. Eleven of 211 Republicans voted with every Democrat to sideline Greene in a rebuke of her embrace of extremist ideology.
As recently as late last year, Greene had been an open adherent of the QAnon ideology — a sprawling web of claims that have incited violence and that played a role in inspiring the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. In addition, she made comments on social media suggesting that some mass shootings were staged by supporters of gun control, that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were orchestrated by government forces and that a Jewish cabal had sparked a deadly wildfire with a laser beam from space.
Ahead of the vote Thursday, Greene renounced some of her claims in a House floor speech. But she also lashed out at Democrats and the media while sidestepping many of her actions, including social media postings endorsing the assassinations of prominent Democrats and her harassment of a well-known gun-control advocate.
Many Democrats, and some Republicans, said they did not believe Greene was sufficiently contrite and had avoided a straightforward apology for her actions — including her promulgation of QAnon falsehoods, which she explained Thursday as, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”
Greene is part of a growing strain of Republican lawmakers who view legislating as a less important task than communications, focused their messages on right-wing media while largely ignoring the more traditional local media outlets most new members of Congress have tended to in the past.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., also first elected in November, recently told lawmakers that he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” according to a Time magazine report last month. Just one month into office, Cawthorn’s communications focus has made him a regular on Fox News.
They are following a path blazed by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., first elected in 2016, who has focused his energy on cable news and social media. Last week, as conservatives were angry after Rep. Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump, Gaetz flew to her state of Wyoming to attend a rally of her opponents.
This focus has left centrist lawmakers bewildered.
“We live in a political environment in which theatrics and division and hate are what elevates stars,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., a second-term member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group focused on legislating.
“I don’t want to give oxygen to someone who is not worthy of it,” Phillips said, frustrated by the attention Greene continues to consume. “And it saddens that any member that would want to come here and say that committee work doesn’t matter — then what are you doing here?”
Trump has publicly praised Greene in the past, and Greene has suggested she intends to meet with Trump in the near future. On Friday, Greene offered Trump extensive praise and noted that “a record number of Republicans” voted for him.
“It’s because they loved his policies. They loved his fight. They love the fact that, for once, we had a president that stood up for America, stood up for American businesses and remembered the forgotten man,” she said, adding, “Republican voters support him still. The party is his, it doesn’t belong to anybody else.”
That proposition is debatable. While only 11 Republicans broke with party leaders and voted to marginalize Greene, Cheney survived another proxy battle to hold onto her position as the GOP conference chairwoman, No. 3 in leadership.
A push from Trump loyalists to remove Cheney from her leadership position failed in a secret-ballot vote where more than two-thirds of Republicans voted to keep her in place — heeding a call by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for unity ahead of the 2022 midterms.