Only six months after former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was ousted as House speaker following a "motion to vacate" triggered by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) is threatening to do the same thing to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). As Greene sees it, Johnson has betrayed the MAGA movement by being willing to negotiate with President Joe Biden and Democrats on funding the federal government and military aide to Ukraine.
In a scathing op-ed published on April 8, the National Review's Rich Lowry slams her campaign against Johnson as "preposterous" and argues that Greene is only hurting the GOP's small House majority.
"Greene made her anti-Mike Johnson case on Tucker Carlson's show last week, and it was — as you'd expect — a stew of conspiratorial thinking and sophomoric ranting," Lowry laments. "You might say the anti-Johnson forces aren't sending their best, but such is the weakness of their case that MTG is the best they've got.
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The conservative National Review editor adds that Johnson "should feel a responsibility to at least get a Ukraine package to a vote."
"There's a bipartisan majority in both chambers of Congress in favor of sending more aid to Ukraine, and Johnson is the one standing in the way," Lowry explains. "If he doesn't move and Ukraine subsequently collapses on the battlefield, he will have played an outsized role in the defeat of an ally at the hands of a U.S. adversary."
On Carlson's show, Greene claimed that sending military aid to Ukraine violates "every tenet of our Christian faith."
"That the United States should feel a moral compulsion to sit by and watch authoritarian states threaten the European order in pursuit of a neo-imperial and anti-western agenda is, shall we say, an interesting interpretation of the word of God," Lowry argues. "Doing a little somnology from afar, Greene also noted that Johnson is always complaining that he's tired and only getting three hours of sleep."
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The National Review editor continues, "Since she, too, has been very busy in her life but always gotten seven or eight hours of sleep a night, she believes this shows that Johnson must have a guilty conscience that's keeping him up…. Maybe Johnson's sleep is disturbed by the thought that his majority is so small that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene matters. And who can blame him?"
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Rich Lowry's full National Review op-ed is available at this link.