When two parallel political dramas collided in a conference room in the House of Republicans on Wednesday night, the result was revealing for the party’s future after Donald Trump.
In fact, it’s almost as if he never left.
In a marathon of closed-door meetings, Republican lawmakers closed ranks around Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the conspiracy theorist who disliked QA, while some spent hours dragging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), third place The House Republican voted for Trump’s impeachment for inciting the Capitol rebellion on January 6.
Cheney ended up surviving a challenge to his leadership position in a vote at the conference on Wednesday night, in a 145 to 61 vote, according to several reports. She will remain president of a GOP conference that is taking a very different path than she would like. Meanwhile, Greene – who was revealed last week for endorsing social media posts calling for the murder of spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi – received a standing ovation from Republican Party lawmakers after she made brief statements defending herself during the meeting, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
The House Republican Party leader, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), is trying to keep this rebellious family while trying to regain a majority in 2022. He praised and defended Cheney during the meeting, but according to two known sources, he he spent more time putting together a defense for Greene, who is facing pressure led by Democrats to remove her from her duties on the committee.
This echoed a statement McCarthy released Wednesday afternoon, in which he “unequivocally” condemned Greene’s comments and said he spoke to her. But he mainly blamed Democrats for “distracting” Congress with the pressure to remove Greene in a “party takeover” and gave no indication that he would discipline her in any way, let alone remove her from committee positions. Budget and Education Committee. .
And while McCarthy defended Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment as a matter of conscience, ordinary members censored her for exposing them to attacks through the way she announced her position. Ultimately, more Republican lawmakers spoke out in defense of the Republican Wyoming than against it, according to an ally of Cheney. And the final vote to keep her in the lead reflected what had been conventional wisdom in Republican Party circles for weeks: that most members, even if they disagreed with her vote, respected her and wanted to keep her as a leader.
The fact that Greene escaped without even slapping his wrist, but Cheney faced a vote on his ability to serve as a leader angered Republican Party aides, who longed for the kind of conservatism Cheney brings to the table – rather than the one who, like Greene, suggests that Jewish-controlled satellite lasers start forest fires.
Prior to the meeting, Republican Party advisers said that Greene’s growing controversies began to overshadow the effort of a group of conservative agitators to get Cheney out of the lead. Democrats, enraged by Greene’s conduct and previous demands, are increasingly putting pressure on their party leaders to support dramatic action to rebuke her. Many ordinary Democratic lawmakers supported Greene’s approval not only on their committees, but also in Congress. A bill to expel the Georgia Republican from office, introduced last week by Representative Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), has nearly 70 co-sponsors on Wednesday.
And on Monday, a resolution by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) started circulating to remove Greene from her duties on the House Education and Work Committee and the House Budget Committee.
These measures were supported as McCarthy continued to promise a “conversation” with Greene, but avoided any compromise – or even any suggestion – on what he could do to discipline it.
Some advisers to both parties complained that the Democrats’ decision to force a plenary vote could leave McCarthy out of danger. But then they started using the resolution as a damocles sword to hover over the Republican Party leader, with Democratic leaders saying that if he didn’t remove Greene from the committees, they would move on with a vote to do it themselves – what is scheduled for Thursday.
Before Wednesday, many Republicans thought that a plenary vote on Greene’s fate was the worst case scenario. Democratic campaign officials are already promising to make Greene an anchor for the Republican Party in the middle of the 2022 term, linking her to all vulnerable lawmakers and a vote recording her defense would make this task infinitely easier.
Pelosi telegraphed these attacks on Wednesday afternoon, just before the start of the meeting, sending out a press release with the subject “McCarthy (Q-CA) Fails to Lead, Hands Keys to Party to Greene.”
A Republican Party agent, speaking anonymously to The Daily Beast to describe the dynamics frankly, said “it is completely stupid” for McCarthy to submit his conference to a possibly damaging vote on Greene.
But on Wednesday afternoon, many Republicans had decided on two methods of attacking Democrats, avoiding any reckoning with Greene and his place in the party: bypassing certain Democrats or condemning the process.
Some Republican Party lawmakers began to revive the pressure two years ago to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from their committees because of comments that invoked anti-Semitic tropes – although, notably, Omar apologized while Greene only bent on its own defense.
Then, at a meeting of the House Rules Committee to consider the resolution removing Greene from its committees, Republican Party lawmakers condemned this as a rush to try someone who hadn’t even made the incendiary statements while in office.
“What are we doing, Mr. President?” asked Congressman Jackie Walorski (R-IN), the top Republican on the House Rules Committee, who said that Greene’s punishment by a Democratic majority would set a damaging precedent. “I’m not here to defend Rep. Greene,” she said. “I’m here to defend the Chamber’s case.”
The Democrats had a direct response. “If the precedent is to remove people from the committees that asked for murders,” said Jim McGovern (D-MA), chairman of the Rules Committee, “I’m fine with that.”
Cheney, for his part, had a much better stretch than Greene before Wednesday. Focusing directly on the freshman congresswoman from Georgia after a series of reports revealing her strange previous comments, the effort to remove her from the leadership – which, according to instigators, supposedly had up to 100 supporters – seemed to stagnate for now. “I don’t think there are any votes,” said a Republican Party adviser before the meeting, who noted that Greene’s drama was “overshadowing” Cheney.
Powerful Republicans also came to Cheney’s defense: Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate, left little doubt about where he fell in this intra-party war. On Monday, he issued statements in which he praised Cheney as a “leader of deep convictions”, while saying that Greene supported “crazy lies” and was “cancer” in the party.
McConnell, however, may no longer be a reflection of his party’s base and the complicated politics that many Republicans face when trying to maintain base support. Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), a longtime ally of Cheney who told The Daily Beast last year that he hoped to see her as the first woman to speak about the party, declined on Wednesday to say whether the would support a vote, but if he offered he was “disappointed” with his comments.
“When I take a leadership position, I take on the additional responsibility of representing many other members who, at the same time, may have different feelings than I do on an issue,” said Banks, who is a member of the GOP Leadership Chamber. “I don’t throw them under the bus, I don’t use rhetoric or I attack a colleague.”
Senator Cynthia Lummis, a first-year Republican from Cheney’s home state of Wyoming, who previously held the seat in the House that Cheney now holds, refused to defend her. Capitol reporters asked three questions about Cheney’s fate, and she gave the same evasive answer each time: “The House must do what the House decides to do.”