House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor He easily stopped Congressman Greene from removing him from office. .
The vote to cancel the activity was an overwhelming majority of 359 to 43, with seven votes in favor. Democrats flocked to Mr. Johnson’s rescue, with all but 39 voting with Republicans to block his ouster.
House minority members have never supported a speaker from another party, and last fall, when Kevin McCarthy, the last Republican to serve as speaker, faced a vote to remove him, Democrats moved en masse to pass the motion. Voted in favor of. This led to his expulsion and historic exile.
This time, Democratic support made a crucial difference, allowing Johnson, with a narrow majority, to avoid an impeachment vote altogether. Greene appeared to be politically isolated for weeks, removing yet another Republican chair, but 11 Republicans ultimately voted to allow her motion to move forward. Ta.
That was the same number of Republicans who voted to allow the McCarthy removal bill to move forward in October, when all Democrats voted in favor.
“I appreciate my colleagues’ expression of confidence in defeating this misguided effort,” Johnson told reporters shortly after Wednesday’s vote. “As I’ve said from the beginning and as I’ve made clear here every day, I’m going to do my job. I’m going to do what I believe is right, what I’ve been elected to do. That’s leadership, in my opinion.
“Hopefully,” he added. “This ends the personal politics and frivolous character assassination that characterized the 118th Congress.”
This lopsided vote solidified the power dynamics that defined Mr. Johnson’s status as a speaker, much like Mr. McCarthy before him. Whenever Republican leaders face a major challenge, such as avoiding a government shutdown or a catastrophic national debt default, they rely on the mainstream to bypass the far-right opposition and provide the votes to accomplish it. It relies on a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.
The result has been to empower Democrats at the expense of the hard-right wing, which enraged Greene, who was booed by some of her colleagues when she took to the House floor to make a scathing appeal on Wednesday. This is about that very phenomenon. He empowered Mr Johnson and what she called the “Unionist Party”.
Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York told reporters: “Our decision to prevent Marjorie Taylor Greene from plunging the House and the country into further turmoil is a bipartisan decision. “It’s rooted in our determination to solve problems for ordinary Americans in a way that matters.” Immediately after voting. “We will continue to govern in a rational, responsible and results-oriented manner, and we will continue to govern our people throughout the day.”
Greene’s move to oust Johnson comes as the speaker, over the objections of Greene and other right-wing Republicans, is pushing back $95 billion in long-overdue national security funding to support Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies. The move comes about three weeks after the security spending package was pushed through. He firmly opposed sending additional aid to Kiev.
As Greene called out the resolution and read it aloud, lawmakers jeered loudly. As Johnson read the bill aloud, Republican lawmakers lined up on the House floor, shaking his hand and patting him on the back.
“Given a choice between advancing Republican priorities or allying with Democrats to maintain personal power, Mr. Johnson will always choose to ally with Democrats,” Greene said. He read out his statement of determination.
She concluded with a formal call for his removal: “Now, therefore, it is resolved that the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
It’s the second time in less than a year that Republicans have called for the removal of their own chairman, about seven months after Republicans, with support from Democrats, succeeded in removing Mr. McCarthy from office.
Earlier this week, Greene seemed unsure whether to actually vote to remove her. She met for hours with Mr. Johnson for the second day in a row, flanked by her biggest ally, Representative Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and laid out her list of demands in exchange for no vote. presentation.
Among the demands: cutting off all future U.S. aid to Ukraine, cutting off funding to the Justice Department, and cutting off all future U.S. aid to Ukraine if lawmakers fail to negotiate a deal to fund the government in September. It included imposing a across-the-board 1% cut in spending bills.
But Mr Johnson was unfazed by their pleas, telling reporters he was not negotiating with Mr Green or Mr Massey.
That left Mr. Greene, whose brand of pugnacious politics is a relentless drive to fight the party establishment, in a bind. She had little choice but to threaten and call for a vote for weeks, even though she knew she would be rejected. Even after Jeffries said Democrats would vote to block any ouster attempt, she remained determined to undermine Johnson publicly and force Democrats to bail him out. .
“This is exactly what the American people needed to see,” she told reporters on the House steps after the vote. “I didn’t come here and run for Parliament to join the Unionist Party. Today the Unionist stance was on full display.”
“Right now, Democrats are in control of Speaker Johnson,” she added.
Just 32 Democrats voted to allow Greene’s motion to advance, while the remaining seven voted “yes” and did not register a position.
Greene first filed the motion against Johnson in March, when lawmakers were voting on the $1.2 trillion spending bill that Johnson passed in the House over the objections of the Republican majority. It was late in the year. She called the move a “betrayal” and said she wanted to send a “warning” to the speaker, leaving the threat in the air for weeks afterwards.
Mr. Johnson pressed on anyway and put together a package of aid for Ukraine. Mr Green had previously described the move as a red line calling for Mr Johnson to step down, but it did not mean Mr Johnson’s threats would be carried out immediately.
“I’m going to send my colleagues home to hear from the voters,” Greene said after the vote, predicting that Republicans would join in the outcry from voters over Johnson’s removal. Foreign aid bill. Instead, many of them heard the exact opposite and returned to Washington expressing skepticism about Johnson’s removal.
Had she been successful in Wednesday’s vote, she would have simply prompted the House to vote for the second time in more than 100 years on whether to expel the speaker. When Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz incited Mr. McCarthy’s removal from office in October, such a scene had not been seen in the chamber since 1910.
But this time, Green had more trouble finding support to remove the speaker. House Republicans, wary of a return to the kind of chaos that paralyzed the House for weeks after McCarthy’s ouster, have been bubbling privately about the public unrest caused by Greene’s threats. .
Even ultra-conservatives like Gaetz have expressed concern about removing another speaker, and given that Republican control is rapidly narrowing, the measure would shift control of the House to Democrats. He suggested that there was a risk of handing him over to
Former President Donald J. Trump also defended Johnson, arguing on social media minutes after the vote that polls showed the Republican Party doing well in November’s election and that any show of division would weaken it. He called on Republicans in the media to kill Greene’s efforts. party.
“If you show DISUNITY portrayed as CHAOS, it will negatively affect everything!” he wrote.
He called Johnson a “good guy who is trying very hard,” but did not completely rule out the idea of sacking him.
With such a small Republican majority in the House, “we are in no position to do so,” Trump wrote. “Maybe someday, but now is not the time.”
