Following an April 10 meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) reiterated her frustration with Mr. Johnson’s tenure as speaker.
Ms. Greene told reporters the two did not reach a deal during the meeting, and that she told Mr. Johnson that he has broken the House GOP’s “trust.”
“We didn’t walk out with a deal,” she said outside the speaker’s office. “I explained to him that, and he acknowledged, that as a Republican member of the House, I pretty much have the best view of how the base feels and what Republican voters want.”
She did not explicitly say whether she would bring the motion to vacate to the floor. Ms. Greene said that assistance for Ukraine and the bill to reauthorize the controversial Section 702 of FISA, which allows surveillance abroad and has come under fire for what critics say is spying on Americans, are unacceptable, although she said she did not give Mr. Johnson “a red line.”
She said Mr. Johnson would not say if he will bring Ukraine aid to the floor, even though Mr. Johnson previously said that he wants to help Ukraine.
Ms. Greene said she also rebuked him for last month putting forth on the floor a $1.2 trillion bill to fund most of the government. After the House passed it, Ms. Greene filed a motion to oust Mr. Johnson, although she has not forced a vote on it on the House floor. She said that the motion is a warning to him.
Ms. Greene lamented that Mr. Johnson’s “leadership has been completely opposite” of former President Donald Trump’s policies.
Overall, she said, the meeting was “extremely open, honest, direct, and passionate at times.”
“He has not done the job that we elected him to do,” Ms. Greene said. “And I told him that.”
Ahead of the meeting, Mr. Johnson tacitly responded to the motion filed by Ms. Greene to strip him of the gavel. He warned that such an effort would bring “chaos in the House.”
“She’s [a] colleague. I’ve always considered her a friend; Marjorie and I don’t disagree, I don’t think, on any matter of philosophy. We’re both conservatives, you know, but we do disagree sometimes on strategy and with regard to what we put on the floor and when and those things,” Mr. Johnson told reporters on April 10.
He acknowledged Ms. Greene’s frustration with the appropriations for fiscal year 2024 but noted that the GOP does not have much leverage with its one-vote majority in the House, and it does not control the Senate or the presidency.
“We are not going to be able to do big transformational changes that we'd like, that we know are necessary. And for example, the budget and then spending, we’re not going to get all of our priorities,” Mr. Johnson said.
“We will never get 100 percent of what we want and believe is necessary for the country because that’s the reality.
“It’s a matter of math, and in the Congress, the numbers, the votes that are available.”
Mr. Johnson said it would not have been worth shutting down the government as doing so would mean that Border Patrol, troops, and TSA agents would not get paid.
Shutting down the government, he said, “would put a lot of pressure on the American people, the American economy at a very desperate time. We can’t have large sections of the border being totally uncontrolled.”
The motion to vacate “wouldn’t be helpful,” Mr. Johnson said. “It would be chaos in the House.”
Ms. Greene wrote a scathing letter to colleagues on April 9 regarding Mr. Johnson. She referred to her letter when speaking with reporters after her meeting with the speaker.
In it, she lamented Mr. Johnson’s breaking of his policies, such as allowing input from rank-and-file members, and passing legislation through regular order that includes allowing amendments to be brought up on the floor.
Ms. Greene listed examples including Mr. Johnson’s pushing through of cobbled-up government funding bills that she said gave Democrats all that they wanted, a lack of conservative victories, and a continuation of President Joe Biden’s agenda.
“As a matter of fact, there is little daylight between Nancy Pelosi’s omnibus in the 117th Congress and Mike Johnson’s omnibus in the 118th Congress, in spite of Americans giving Republicans the majority in order to stop the Democrats’ ‘America Last’ destructive agenda,” her letter reads.
Ms. Greene refuted the notion that removing the gavel from Mr. Johnston would hand the role to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
She argued that this would not be the case if there were additional retirements and if no Republicans cast a ballot for Mr. Jeffries to become speaker.
