Marjorie Taylor Greene sees red on Washington path of wrath

Apart from anything else, the Capitol building in Washington is a house of splendours when it comes to the volume and range of statues posing in the shadows of its ornate corridors. Everyone from Henry Clay to Amelia Earhart, Chief Standing Bear and Ronald Reagan stands as solemn reminders of the scale of historical and political achievement in American life.

Walking through it must be a daunting experience for many new representatives. But if Marjorie Taylor Greene has ever stopped long enough to absorb the weight of that collective intellect and achievement, she has kept it well hidden. Her four years in Congress have been characterised by a seemingly limitless appetite for confrontation and a bewildering confection of wild conspiracy theories capable of causing jaws to drop in political contemporaries and perhaps even historical statues.

Her vow this week to force a vote to oust her fellow Republican and House Speaker Mike Johnson guarantees another week where she dominates both headlines and head space in the Capitol. The decision by Johnson to amend and steer a crucial bipartisan bill through the House, guaranteeing a financial package to Ukraine, Israel and humanitarian aid to Gaza, was greeted as a rare triumph of bipartisan co-operation in a fractious Congress. But it placed Johnson directly in Taylor Greene’s path of wrath. Vocally opposed to aid for Ukraine, she vowed at the time to force a vote to remove Johnson from his role – and thereby throw the House into further chaos. After a few weeks of will-she-won’t-she, Wednesday’s announcement confirmed her intention to force a vote that is predestined to fail, with Democratic representatives certain to vote to ensure that Johnson – and therefore some semblance of stability – remains.

“I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again having supported a Republican speaker- a ‘Christian Conservative’,” Greene said when she spoke to the media outside the building, using air quotes.

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“Has the Republican Party finally learned their lesson? Are they willing to actually fight or are they going to just keep goin’ along to get along? Because it’s really easy to do that in Washington DC.”

For the more moderate Republicans – the party has a slender majority in the House, 217 seats to 212 with six vacant seats – this represents another headache. One of the more recent departures from the House was Ken Buck, the Republican representative from Colorado who announced his resignation in March. Although staunchly conservative in his world view, he delivered a scathing rebuke of Greene during the bipartisan controversy, saying that “she was always focused on her social media account. And ‘Moscow Marjorie’ is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage.”

The name stuck and after the House passed the $61 billion aid package, the New York Post gleefully depicted a front page picture of Greene wearing a superimposed furry ushanka hat with the headline, “Nyet, Moscow Marjorie”.

The image was humorous in a grim sort of way, but it was indicative of the national impact Greene has made in her four quick years on the Capitol. Many congressional representatives go through their entire political careers in virtual national anonymity. But Greene’s emergence from rural Georgia, after a political awakening during the 2016 election, was distinguished by a series of opinions and theories that have quickly established her as the most vocal and extreme of the hardline Trump Republicans.

She has espoused conspiracy theories on everything from the cause of wildfires to the tragic death of John F Kennedy Jr in a plane crash in 1999. By 2021, Greene responded to the widening criticism and alarm caused by her world view by posting a “message to the mob” in which she declared that the “smear campaign” against her had led to $1.6 million in small donations into her campaign account and the consolidation of her support base in Georgia. It established a pattern: the more she is denounced by mainstream media, the more donations pour in.

She vowed in that message to never back down.

She was true to her word on that one. In July last year, she was ejected from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus for repeated attacks on fellow Republicans. In March, she acted as agitator and heckler in chief during Joe Biden’s state of the union address, and now comes her showdown with Johnson, whom, she has said, “is not capable of that job”.

It’s a fiery, provocative stance from one of Trump’s arch-supporters and would-be vice presidential nominees. And it’s a further reminder that however and wherever Greene goes, it will not be quiet.