It is hardly accidental that a growing number of Republican senators are sticking their nose into House business and waging a coordinated campaign to ostracize conspiracy-fanning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene with scathing public statements denouncing the freshman Georgia congresswoman.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has warned Republican colleagues in private conference meetings the GOP faces a new “John Birch Society” problem that must be aggressively purged. The Kentuckian is encouraging them to join the fight, to ensure the party is positioned to win back the Senate in 2022 and preserve its viability beyond, by making abundantly clear that Greene and her promotion of QAnon and other outlandish conspiracies are persona non grata.
“I think he is worried about the party presenting a responsible governing alternative to the American people,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist in Louisville aligned with McConnell. “How can you not be worried about the long-term implications for the Republican Party?”
McConnell’s admonishment of Greene, rare for the deliberate tactician, is reminiscent of late National Review founder William F. Buckley and his successful effort in the 1960s to expel the John Birch Society from respectable right-wing politics. The group espoused a range of conspiracy theories, including that the United States government was enthralled to a secret communist cabal. Buckley fretted the society would infiltrate and taint the conservative movement if not denounced by Republicans.
Senate Republicans, from McConnell allies to close associates of former President Donald Trump, have answered the minority leader’s call, using conversations with reporters and Twitter posts to repudiate Greene. In the process, they have specifically rebuked QAnon, a conspiracy that claims Trump is going to rescue the country from the clutches of powerful Democrats who engage in pedophilia and run an international child sex-trafficking ring. “It’s insane,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis tweeted.
The broadside against Greene is the latest front in a widening schism between establishment Republicans and conservative populists loyal to Trump. Republican leaders focused on upcoming elections fear political aftershocks from the 45th president’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in 2020 and the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. The potential rise of Trump-inspired candidates like Greene in primaries in 2022 is especially troubling to some GOP insiders.
McConnell, one Republican senator explained, “is generally concerned about Trump’s ongoing influence and concerned about the fringe elements that Trump brought into the party” because history shows they are not viable in general elections. Over the years, Republicans have watched offensive candidates blow winnable races in swing states, and even, occasionally, in red states. To win back the Senate majority next year, from its current 50-50 status with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tiebreaking votes in favor of the Democrats, Republicans must compete in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, among others.
Conservative populists have always been a key part of the Republican coalition though junior to the Reagan traditionalists.
Trump’s presidency elevated the populists. The former president leaves in his wake a GOP less supportive of free trade and a hawkish foreign policy and more skeptical of big business and immigration. Grassroots Republicans are as enamored with Trump as ever. Notwithstanding the Republicans Trump chased out of the party, particularly in the suburbs, significant percentages of GOP voters beyond the base recall his presidency fondly and believe he got a raw deal in the election.
But in Washington, simmering intraparty divisions have boiled over in the three months since President Biden ousted Trump, most vividly in the House.
On Jan. 6, as Congress voted amid the Capitol siege to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory, a majority of House Republicans objected, moving to throw out the president’s wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania. They hoped to challenge electoral votes from additional states but were thwarted when Republican senators declined to join them (the prerequisite for triggering a debate.) Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican critical of the objection efforts, said it was a massive leadership failure.
“There still would have been an objection,” he said in an interview. “But I certainly think a significant number of those 138 were people that didn’t want to vote for it but didn’t want to make waves.” Kinzinger added that if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana “had taken a strong stand, for sure, it certainly wouldn’t have been a majority. … It’s a disappointment.”
When the House voted to impeach Trump one week after the insurrection on the grounds that he incited the riot, House Republicans loyal to Trump assailed their 10 GOP colleagues who voted “yea.” They demanded Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 ranking House Republican, who was among the 10, step down from leadership or be removed. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who led the charge, traveled to Wyoming to rally voters to oust Cheney in 2022.
“Liz Cheney taunts me for wearing makeup in my television appearances,” Gaetz said recently on the steps of the state capital in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “It’s pretty easy for me to get a little makeup off my shirt, far more difficult for Liz Cheney to get the blood off her hands for sending America’s best to foreign lands to die for unknowable gain and personal profit.”
To quell the infighting, McCarthy and Scalise called a closed-door conference meeting of House Republicans Wednesday evening to address both the Cheney and Greene controversies. McCarthy made an impassioned plea to retain Cheney as the conference chairwoman. It worked. She easily won a no-confidence vote. McCarthy also urged a “no” vote against Democratic efforts to throw Greene off of her committees. Greene, contrite, also addressed the matter.
The congresswoman told colleagues, in remarks she repeated Thursday on the House floor, that her career as a provocateur who whips up conspiracy theories to explain unsettling events is over. Greene disavowed some, though not all, of the wild claims she has made in the past. Still, she argued that the media has distorted her image and some of the things she has said while saying it operates similar to the QAnon conspiracy.
“School shootings are absolutely real,” Greene said at one point, reversing herself on one of the conspiracies she once advocated. “I also want to tell you, 9/11 absolutely happened.” In one video posted on social media before Greene was elected to Congress, she questions whether a jetliner was crashed into the Pentagon, as actually occurred during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Republicans worried about the impact she and others like her will have on the party’s image, and political prospects remain suspicious of Greene and expect this problem to be an issue for the GOP going forward.
