OPINION
DAVID
FRENCH
Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Not as Powerful as She
Thinks She Is
May 5,
2024, 6:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/opinion/marjorie-taylor-greene-mike-johnson.html
David
French
By David
French
Opinion
Columnist
In an
interview last week, NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Speaker Mike Johnson about
Marjorie Taylor Greene, and before Burman could finish his question, Johnson
responded with classic Southern scorn. “Bless her heart,” he said, and then he
told Burman that Greene wasn’t proving to be a serious lawmaker and that he
didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her.
Strangely
enough, Johnson’s dismissal of Greene — on the eve of her potential effort to
oust him from the office he won in October — spoke as loudly as his decision to
put a vote for Ukraine aid on the floor in the first place. In spite of the
Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House and the constant threat of a
motion to vacate the chair, he will not let MAGA’s most extreme lawmaker run
the place.
To
understand the significance of this moment, it’s necessary to understand the
changing culture of the MAGAfied Republican Party. After eight years of Donald
Trump’s dominance, we know the fate of any Republican politician who directly
challenges him — the confrontation typically ends his or her political career
in the most miserable way possible, with dissenters chased out of office amid a
hail of threats and insults. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Adam Kinzinger and Liz
Cheney are but a few of the many Republicans who dared to defy Trump and paid a
high political price.
But there’s
an open question: Does the MAGA movement have the same control over the
Republican Party when Trump isn’t directly in the fray? Can it use the same
tactics to impose party discipline and end political careers? If the likes of
Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gaetz or Charlie Kirk can wield the same power,
then the transformation of the party will be complete. It won’t be simply in
thrall to Trump; it will be in thrall to his imitators and heirs and perhaps
lost to the reactionary right for a generation or more.
I don’t
want to overstate the case, but Johnson’s stand — together with the Democrats’
response — gives me hope. Consider the chain of events. On April 12, Johnson
appeared at Mar-a-Lago and received enough of a blessing from Trump to make it
clear that Trump didn’t want him removed. Days before a vote on Ukraine aid
that directly defied the MAGA movement, Trump said Johnson was doing a “very
good job.”
Days later,
Johnson got aid to Ukraine passed with more Democratic votes than Republican —
a violation of the so-called Hastert Rule, an informal practice that says the
speaker shouldn’t bring a vote unless the measure is supported by a majority
within his own party. Greene and the rest of MAGA exploded, especially when
Democratic lawmakers waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor. Greene vowed to
force a vote on her motion to end Johnson’s speakership. She filed the motion
in March as a “warning” to Johnson, and now she’s following through — directly
testing her ability to transform the House.
But what
happened after the Ukraine vote was truly fascinating. First, Republicans who
voted for Ukraine aid found their actual constituents were generally fine with
the vote. Many supported Ukraine. There was little to no backlash back home.
Second,
Democrats came to Johnson’s aid. Last Tuesday, the top three Democrats in the
House — Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar — issued a statement
supporting Johnson and opposing Greene’s motion to vacate. “If she invokes the
motion,” they said, “it will not succeed.”
Next, the
Republican Party’s human weather vane, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, blasted
Greene in an interview with RealClearPolitics’s Phil Wegmann, telling him that
“what’s she’s doing is really unhelpful to the country.” Of course, Cruz will
pivot on a dime if Trump turns on Johnson, but at the moment the power dynamic
is clear, and MAGA without Trump is much more bark than bite.
In fact, if
you take a step back and look at Biden’s term so far, one can see the outlines
of healthy government — at least so long as Trump stays out of the fray. There
is a rough governing consensus on a number of fronts. In 2021, for example,
Congress passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. In December 2022, it passed
the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan compromise bill that protects both
gay marriage and religious liberty, and that same month it passed bipartisan
reforms to the Electoral Count Act that will make it much more difficult for a
losing candidate to sow chaos after a presidential election.
Combine
those measures with the immensely important foreign aid package passed last
month, and you can see the outlines of a functioning Congress, one in which
compromise and persuasion are still tools of the trade.
But that
infuriates MAGA, which scorns compromise and persuasion as weakness. It derides
bipartisan legislation as a product of a corrupt Washington “uniparty.” And so
Greene is pushing ahead with her motion to vacate. If Johnson survives the vote
with Democratic support, she’ll label him the “Democrat speaker” and continue
her relentless political guerrilla war.
It has been
nine years since Trump came down the escalator, and since that time MAGA has
become a movement that hopes to outlive Trump himself. It’s systematically
dismantling the old G.O.P. and attempting to recreate the party in its own
image. But it has never been clear to me that MAGA can survive without Trump,
and Johnson’s battle with Greene tells us why.
To
paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s devastating takedown of Dan Quayle in the
1988 vice-presidential debate, we know Donald Trump. He’s been a megawatt
celebrity for more than four decades. He built an entire brand around the false
notion that he was one of the world’s greatest businessmen. He has an uncanny
ability to reach his core audience. And you, Representative Greene, are no
Donald Trump.
Neither is
the rest of MAGA. The clown car collection of MAGA personalities who orbit
Trump is often both profoundly weird and remarkably inept. They suffered a
collective humiliation in the 2022 midterm elections. Mainstream Republicans
coasted to victory in key elections in Georgia, Ohio and Florida, while the
election-denying MAGA conspiracy theorists suffered a string of losses in
battleground states.
The
scandals and conspiracies that don’t seem to touch Trump at all can still bring
down other Republicans, including the MAGA candidates who hug Trump the
hardest. It turns out that the vaunted ideological change of the Republican
Party from Reaganite conservatism to America First and working-class populism
may well be overblown.
This makes
the 2024 election all the more crucial. If Trump wins, MAGA has four more years
to consolidate its hold on the Republican Party and transform the conservative
movement from the inside out. But if Trump loses, the battle is joined once
again.
And if the
mismatch between Speaker Johnson and Greene is any indication, I would not
presume that MAGA will win the day.
David
French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed
conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former
constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s
Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can
follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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