The threat far-right hysteric Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene issued six weeks ago to force a vote to oust mild-mannered House Speaker Mike Johnson from his chair ended with a whimper Tuesday afternoon.
Early on, she had a chance to get it done in the more-chaos-the-merrier House Republican Conference that took down Kevin McCarthy after less than a year in the Speaker’s chain. But as the weeks went by, Greene kept screaming about Johnson being weak and outfoxed by Democrats. In the interim, other members had begun to lower their voices. Johnson quietly passed legislation, delaying a government shutdown, and sent a massive foreign aid package to the floor to send arms to Ukraine, knowing he would break the Hastert rule, the hearts of his nemesis Greene, and others in the Vladimir Putin caucus. But he did it, and it passed. Biden signed it. It’s the law, and no one was harmed making it.
It’s not that Johnson did it on his own but that the bespectacled misfit did it at all. As Greene kept after him, Johnson got smart and trekked to Mar-a-Lago to check in with the boss, who complimented him for “doing a good job,” enough of a pat on the back to signal MAGA folks in Washington to hold their fire. Michael Whatley, Trump’s hand-picked replacement for Ronna McDaniel at the Republican National Committee, made a face-to-face appeal to Greene to cut it out. While the 49-year-old Georgian shrieked that she, not the accidental Speaker from Shreveport, Louisiana, was Trump’s person in Washington, it didn’t matter. Her usual allies in the House Freedom Caucus lost their stomach for another fight. Back in their districts over the weekend, there was little sentiment for another bloodbath so close to an election, and voters were less upset over the arms vote than expected.
Monday, Greene met for over an hour with Johnson, her emotional opposite, in which he politely repeated his mantra that he was doing the best he could with such a slim majority. Her posse shrinking by the minute, she unleashed her usual righteous outrage in front of a bank of microphones, her special place. Another meeting Tuesday yielded none of the myriad concessions from Johnson she wrested from McCarthy for her support. She shelved her motion to vacate until another day.
That doesn’t mean Johnson can relax with a Diet Coke on the Speaker’s glorious balcony overlooking the Mall. The House is never far from a bloodbath as long as Greene’s around and other members who love a good defenestration. With her bottomless stomach for chaos and the fear she’ll be forgotten if she’s out of camera range for a news cycle, any compromise with Democrats can be grounds for another coup attempt. After all, it only takes a single member to move the motion to “vacate the chair,” a change in the rules she wrung out of McCarthy for dragging him across the finish line and the one that ironically did him in.
MTG is going nowhere. As noted here, when McCarthy ascended to the chair after making innumerable side deals, the divorcée could live without a friend but not without an enemy. She famously discovered that Jewish Space Lasers cause wildfires and, advertently or not, expressed support for the assassination of Nancy Pelosi, whom she ridiculed for deploying “gazpacho” police, confusing Hitler’s secret force with a chilled tomato soup. She posted a picture of herself holding a gun next to images of The Squad. She visited January 6 insurrectionists in the D.C. jail whose rendition of the national anthem has a permanent spot on Trump’s playlist, to commiserate as if she were Amnesty International visiting the late Alexei Navalny in the Gulag. If she had been running the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, she promised her troops “they would have been armed” and her forces victorious.
Luckily, some semblance of peace is at hand because Johnson is the opposite of all that. He was not part of McCarthy’s Faustian bargain with Greene that fueled her rocket to fame, so grateful he gave her the honor of wielding the gavel as speaker pro tempore. He compensated for her being stripped of her committee assignments during her first term by awarding her committees a second term where she could go hard on Hunter Biden and easy on Putin. The latter seat on the Homeland Security Committee comes with MTG’s two favorite perks: a microphone and a security clearance.
That’s who McCarthy bequeathed to Johnson, along with every other headache that comes with herding cats. Speaker Johnson is a simpler man whose goal is not world domination but to serve as an interim speaker unless a private elevator, a car purring at the curb, and power he didn’t know existed go to his head. That’s unlikely. Johnson is a reluctant leader who realizes he was no one’s first choice and whose mission is to keep the clocks ticking and the wheels grinding, except some days when he pushes Putin back on his heels. Then he doesn’t act like it, but he’s a rock star.
To restore order, Johnson had to pare the conference’s mean girl down to size. Like a kindergarten teacher isolating the class clown so he could peel off the other kids to resume coloring inside the lines for juice boxes, he treated her with a “Bless your heart” manner while proving to his normal members that he wasn’t another sap like McCarthy who saddled them with deals they didn’t sign on to and a weaponized Greene. He didn’t intend to use the job to climb the slippery pole of politics but to get the place running again.
It’s too soon to say Johnson’s done that or that he’s a good speaker, but not to compare him to a good parent, disciplining his most unruly child, avoiding the limelight, eschewing secret deals, and, to the shock of cynical Democrats, doing what they consider the right thing in sending aid to Volodymyr Zelensky.
It turned out that inside those attention-seeking outfits and a screeching voice crying out on solemn occasions, Greene retained the ability to self-soothe. The fireplug could hold her ground and force a vote, risking the support of Trump, MAGA, and her former posse, who’d grown tired of her antics and the too-wacky-to-govern vibe. Or she could be seen as normal for a moment and retreat. She chose the latter. Who says a firebrand from Milledgeville, Georgia, can’t grow in the job?
With this latest craziness behind them, the GOP can get back to pretending not to watch full-time defendant Trump exposed as the perjury junkie and weird sexual operator he is, and maybe, get back to impeaching Biden appointees, demagoguing antisemitism on campuses, and torturing Hunter Biden rather than eating their own.
