Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Breitbart News exclusively that she is prepared to force House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of his position with a vote to vacate the chair if the Speaker does not willingly resign the position.
“Yes, I am willing to force it,” Greene told Breitbart News in a lengthy exclusive interview on Tuesday afternoon where she explained her plan to remove Johnson and get a real Republican Speaker in his place. “The reality for Mike Johnson that he just is not accepting or refusing to accept, publicly at least, is whether it happens two weeks from now, two months from now, or in the next majority, he will not be Speaker. He just will not be. There may be only two of us public right now. But he does not have the support of the conference at all. There may be people who might not vote to vacate him right now, but they will never vote for him to be Speaker next Congress. There are two large factions in the conference against his speakership.”
Greene has introduced a motion to vacate the chair — a procedure that would remove Johnson as Speaker and force the chamber to select another one. Greene has not made the resolution privileged yet; however, it is a mechanism that would allow her to force a House vote within two days. By saying she is willing to “force it,” that’s what she means — she or any member can force the House to consider the question at any time if Johnson does not agree to leave his position peacefully.
A major development on Tuesday was that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), an influential conservative who sits on the powerful House Rules Committee, publicly joined Greene’s effort, saying he is cosponsoring her motion to vacate the chair. During a closed-door Republican conference meeting, Massie told Johnson to his face — in front of the entire House GOP conference — that he must resign or face the same fate his predecessor, now former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, did last year with a motion to vacate vote. Massie told Johnson, and later told reporters, that if Johnson does not agree to resign willingly he will likely lose even more votes than McCarthy did if and when the motion to vacate is called. Johnson responded to Massie in conference, and then later at a press conference, saying he will not resign — echoing what his spokesman Raj Shah told Breitbart News late last week when pressure began severely ramping up after Johnson was the deciding vote to kill an amendment to the renewal of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would have required the federal government obtain a warrant to engage in surveillance of American citizens. Johnson’s FISA ploy did provide such warrant protections only for members of Congress — protections that Johnson did not deem necessary for hundreds of millions of Americans not currently serving in the United States Congress.
Greene has echoed Massie’s call for Johnson to resign his position, but she told Breitbart News if he does not step aside willingly she is prepared to force the vote to remove him. She said she is currently planning on doing it in a way that does not jeopardize GOP control of the House chamber, and is timing it in a way that is respectful to her Republican colleagues in a way she argues Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and others were not during their removal of McCarthy last year. Greene, notably, was one of McCarthy’s biggest conservative defenders before his ouster and it is worth noting that McCarthy never once during his speakership tried to push a supplemental Ukraine funding plan like Johnson is currently doing and also never once violated what is known as the “Hastert Rule.” The Hastert Rule, named for former Speaker Denny Hastert, is a Republican principle that holds that a GOP Speaker will not bring a proposal to the floor that does not have the support of at least the majority of the majority. Johnson has repeatedly violated the Hastert rule, on spending and on other major proposals — and he routinely relies on Democrats to pass bills through a mechanism called a “suspension of the rules.” Greene told Breitbart News that had the eight who pushed McCarthy out actually believed what they said at the time they would have removed Johnson long ago. It’s worth noting most if not all of those eight are currently defending Johnson.
“Yes I am prepared to do it. But the process of how I am doing it and going about it is I am being respectful of my conference and a Republican majority and I’m also being respectful of my colleagues,” Greene told Breitbart News. “I didn’t like how it was done when they threw out Kevin McCarthy. It was done by force and no one had a say. It was eight Republicans siding with the Democrats and forcing it on the conference while they claimed Kevin McCarthy lied and broke the rules, when in reality if the eight who claimed that are so self-righteous and that’s what they cared about they would have thrown Mike Johnson out long before this because he passed three CRs before we ever got to the two-part omnibus and he passed bills under suspension plenty of times lying to us because he broke his own seven tenets which were the promises he basically self-imposed upon himself in the letter he wrote to our conference when he first became Speaker. So, for me, I think this has to be a process that’s worked carefully, respectfully, and we have to make sure it’s one that works and we’re prepared for because that three-and-a-half weeks after they ousted Kevin McCarthy, that destroyed our conference. We have never recovered from it.”
Greene is confident that if it ever gets to the point where Johnson needs to be forced out — that Johnson does not willingly resign like former Speaker John Boehner did when he saw the writing on the wall back in the fall of 2015 — there will be many more votes against Johnson than there were against McCarthy.
“Of course I’ll never speak for anyone or name names,” Greene said. “That would be very inappropriate and wrong of me. To quote Thomas Massie, what he told Mike Johnson at our conference meeting this morning and he said that ‘if this vote is held it’s very likely there will be more Republicans voting to vacate you than there was against Kevin McCarthy.’”
But, again, the fatigue among House Republicans is something Greene is taking very seriously and considering as she moves forward with the removal of Johnson as Speaker of the House. Asked what the reaction was like to Massie in the GOP conference meeting when he told Johnson to resign and that he was backing Greene’s motion to vacate him, Greene said that while she was not there in the meeting when that happened she heard members were groaning about going through this again.
“From what I understand people were kind of down about it, or just ‘uh, not again’ because that three-and-a-half weeks was so painful for our conference and a lot of these Republicans don’t ever want to rock the boat or change the status quo,” Greene said. “That’s the whole problem. That’s why the Democrats keep winning and the Republicans keep losing, because Republicans never fight, because it’s uncomfortable, and Republicans never want to rock the boat. They just want to show up here in Washington and do their committee hearings and pass their legislation that they can hopefully get signed into law and hang it on their wall and then go back to their district and do whatever they do. But no one is ever taking the important and strategic steps to save our country. I’ll give you some examples. Out on social media today, there was an explosive report about an NGO that is passing out flyers to illegals encouraging them to vote for Joe Biden in the election. Everyone here, at the NRCC, our Republican conference, and many others, they’re busy practically measuring the drapes for the White House right now and totally convinced that Trump is going to win the election and ‘Marjorie, that’s when we’ll fix everything. We’ll do it then.’ But I’m going to tell you right now, I think that’s the worst possible mindset to be in. The Democrats are going to do everything possible to try to stop President Trump. They’re trying to put him in jail for the rest of his life right now. They’re going to do anything they can to make sure he does not win. So why in the world would our side just go along assuming that we’re going to win the White House and that’s when we’re going to stop all the millions of people invading our country and the terrorists coming across and the cartels bringing drugs and murdering our people and Americans being raped and murdered and killed, and the list goes on, and Americans being spied on through FISA? How do we sit there and look at ourselves in the mirror if we go ‘oh we’ll fix it when Trump comes back’? I don’t even think we deserve Republican voters voting for us if that’s our attitude. Here’s my biggest argument: If this is the state of mind of Republicans and Republican leaders, excluding President Trump, President Trump’s only on the ballot one more time — in November. Whether he wins or loses, what will the state of the Republican Party be after Trump? I’m going to argue strongly that Republicans in Congress and Republican leaders have not done anything to earn Republican votes for us to ever control the Republican majority ever again in the future. The only reason people will be voting for Republicans going forward is because they’re voting against Democrats. That is a very bad position to be in in the future.”
Greene also told Breitbart News that the justification for removing Johnson from his position is far beyond his continued backing of Ukraine aid — and his latest scheme to try to trick Congress into passing it. She cited his spending plan, the FISA legislative debacle, and other broad failures from Johnson as Speaker as key in the reasoning why she believes he needs to go.
“I think it’s important to point out that this is one of the most difficult positions to be in in order to wage this fight but this fight is worth it and I’ll tell you why,” Greene told Breitbart News. “The Republican Party has not gotten the message for, I would argue, decades from Republican voters. The leadership in the Republican Party is 100 percent with the Washington establishment and the deep state. They just want to continue things, not rock the boat, and keep it going, keep it going. They hate Trump. They really do. Just because people are coming around as he’s our Republican nominee for president and saying they are supporting him, they are strictly doing that because they cannot get around him. I think it’s extremely important to keep in mind that holding a leader like Mike Johnson accountable and not allowing his leadership to continue is actually a referendum on the Republican Party itself. We’ve had Mitch McConnell for years and years and we keep getting these people.”
Despite decades of GOP establishment failures, Greene said, she thinks Johnson’s speakership is the “biggest betrayal” of them all because she said he claims to be a Trump-supporting America First conservative and a Christian but keeps stabbing Trump supporters in the back with the results from the policies he is proffering.
“Mike Johnson is perhaps the biggest betrayal for America First conservatives across the country because he wears the conservative label and he calls himself a Christian but yet his actions are 100 percent the opposite of what those labels actually mean,” Greene said. “He claims to support President Trump but he funded — with a two-part omnibus that broke all of our rules — he funded the Department of Justice that has 91 federal indictments against President Trump and wants to put him in jail for the rest of his life. He funded the FBI that raided Mar-a-Lago and spied on his campaign through FISA, and he gave the FBI a brand-new building. He fully funded Joe Biden’s open border policies and we all know about how horrific that is. He fully funded the Green New Deal and the climate agenda and then last week he betrayed everyone by being the deciding vote against the warrant requirement that I think has more people angry possibly than the omnibus. Then this week he’s moving forward with this foreign aid package and it’s unbelievably disturbing the dirty tricks they’re doing to try to get this thing passed. It’s funding Ukraine. He’s 100 percent into funding Ukraine, talks about it in our conference meetings and talks about how we have to ‘stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression and he’s going to steamroll across Ukraine and take Poland next’ but in every single one of our meetings and classified briefings no one has ever produced proof of that. So it’s so concerning that they’re tying Israel aid to Ukraine and trying to guilt everyone into voting for Ukraine even though they don’t want to vote for it and want to vote for those separately. Then, he’s doing this foreign security package against foreign threats and he’s wrapping in [Rep. Mike] Gallagher’s TikTok ban into this whole package — Gallagher is leaving on Friday so think about that. Why is the TikTok ban so important you have to tie it to Israel aid? You can’t even comprehend how dirty all this stuff is.”
Greene also said she is furious with Johnson for putting former President Donald Trump in a tough position with his push for a joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago last Friday. At the press conference, which came moments after Johnson’s FISA betrayal on the floor of the House, Trump did say he stands with Johnson. But the icy demeanor from Trump toward Johnson — Trump did not allow Johnson to answer any press questions at the press conference — was apparent, and Trump’s disagreements with Johnson on key policy items, particularly FISA, shone through brightly. What’s more, Johnson then appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s program on Sunday morning claiming Trump stood with him on everything, which caused a backlash so severe that Johnson’s spokesman Raj Shah was forced to publicly correct the record and admit that is not the case in a late-night tweet Monday:
“Well, I of course again will never speak for President Trump nor will I argue with his positions, but I do know from back channels he is not fully supporting Mike Johnson and just like you said the spokesperson came out and clarified some of his positions,” Greene said when asked about the ordeal by Breitbart News. “I think it was extremely unfair for President Trump to be put in that position in the press conference in my opinion. President Trump is laser-focused on winning his election, which is what he should be focused on, and he’s laser-focused on defeating these political trials that he’s having to endure — he’s going through one right now and he’s going to have to miss his own son’s high school graduation, which is extremely upsetting. It’s unspeakable actually — it’s so wrong. So, for Mike Johnson to run down to Mar-a-Lago to get as close as possible to President Trump was literally because he was trying to save his speakership. That’s what that trip was all about. President Trump was coming out to talk about election integrity, which is just as important to all of us and that was the right thing for him to do. I thought he was put in a very unfair position in that press conference and it should not have happened. Shame on the Speaker’s staff for doing it. They shouldn’t have put him in that position. I’m also thankful to President Trump because in his comments he called me a friend — because I am his friend. I fight for him up here in Washington. I’ve traveled the country for him. I am constantly supporting him more than most people. I am very high up there in every single thing I do for President Trump. It doesn’t faze me that Johnson is trying that strategy. Of course I get it. It’s clear what he was trying to do. But his speakership is not safe. As a matter of fact, it’s over — he’s just the only one who hasn’t acknowledged it.”
Greene insists that everything she is doing is to try to help former President Donald Trump win the White House and help the House GOP hold and expand the majority in November — and that she does not need fundraising or attention off of this effort.
“We have a really tight majority — we have a one-seat majority,” Greene said. “But, we have two more Republicans coming very soon, within the next few weeks. One is winning the special election for Bill Johnson’s seat — guaranteed — and another one is winning the special election to fill Kevin McCarthy’s seat, a guaranteed Republican. So we have two more coming. Then, what people need to understand from my perspective: I’ve invested so much money into our majority, I’ve paid all my dues and then some — approximately like half a million dollars to the NRCC to make sure we win the majority and keep the majority next time. I have campaigned all over the country for President Trump. I speak at most of his rallies. I want him to win and in the White House. For anyone who thinks that this is ‘oh she’s doing this for fundraising, or she’s doing this for attention’ they are 100 percent wrong about me. So it’s for me this is the whole reason why I ran for Congress. I ran for Congress because I was so pissed off at Republican leaders that continue to say all the things we like to hear then they do nothing and they literally stand down and allow the Democrats to continue destroying our country.”
Greene added she is being “extremely careful” with every move she’s making here, and while this will end with Johnson’s ouster from the speakership, she is very cognizant of the perceptions of chaos and attempting to make sure the transition to a new Speaker is seamless. She also ripped Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) for his planned resignation, which is coming on Friday, because he timed it so Republicans cannot fill the seat with a special election and the seat will remain vacant until next Congress.
“My objective is to be extremely careful and responsible with our majority,” Greene said. “We can’t risk losing it to the Democrats. It needs to be recognized that Gallagher is leaving on Friday — another betrayal by the way, he left his district and they can’t hold a special to replace him so he intentionally left us short a Republican vote. So I have to be very careful. I can’t just get mad and call a motion to vacate based on the agenda on the floor. Believe me, I wish we had 30 extra Republicans and I could do that but because I’m responsible and I’m not doing this for myself or any other reason I can’t just jump in and do something like that. So I have to use a very smart strategy. I’m being really honest. That’s just the flat-out truth.”
Greene added that there is “sick mental illness” in Washington with the “extreme obsession” for more taxpayer dollars being flushed away into Ukraine.
“So here’s the part that really should bother everyone out in the country,” Greene said. “There is some kind of sick mental illness in this town — an obsession — it is an extreme obsession with funding Ukraine. The more you look at it, it makes no sense whatsoever. Ukraine is not a NATO member nation. They are not our ally that we are contractually bound to protect them. And, Russia is beating them. There is no way for Ukraine to win. Everybody knows that — pro-Ukraine or against the funding for it. Everyone knows Russia is winning. Funding that war is continuing to murder people. That’s it. It’s all it does. It’s killing more and more.”
Greene also said that nobody in Washington is talking about peace in Ukraine, and desperately wants the war and the killing to continue.
“You can fund the war and kill hundreds of thousands of more young Ukrainian men and wipe out that generation and leave children fatherless and have no workers and have widows and mourning parents,” Greene said. “That’s really the truth of that war. I can’t comprehend why the one thing that never gets talked about and I demanded to know at our conference meeting on Monday night is why doesn’t anyone ever talk about peace for this country or a peace deal? It makes me literally sick to my stomach. It’s so evil. No one could answer me. Isn’t that crazy though? Even if I got off the phone with you and marched my way down to the House floor and got recognized and called up that motion to vacate, I’m telling you the obsession and the sickness in Washington, DC, for funding for Ukraine would override any of my actions. They will pass it no matter what. Johnson would probably do that as his last act leaving the speakership. I think it’s unstoppable honestly. But here’s what we do have — and here’s the pressure we need to put on: 117 Republicans voted no to fund $300 million to Ukraine. Only $300 million, on September 28 of last year. Mike Johnson was one of those by the way. He voted no for only $300 million and now he’s obsessed with sending them more than $60 billion. So I think if we can somehow build that and combine the fact that he’s packaging Israel and some other weird stuff into this thing I think maybe some of the crazy progressives or Democrats that all hate Israel and are terrorists actually serving in Congress basically, if they vote against it, I don’t know. We’re literally trying everything we can, but doing it responsibly… My district needs to know I’m not being crazy and I’m not trying to hurt anybody or throw our majority away or let Democrats become Speaker.”
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