Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene occupies a weird liminal space within the conservative political power matrix. As a lone representative for the minority party who's been stripped of her House committee seats, Greene's parliamentary clout is minimal. But what the freshman representative lacks in congressional leverage, she makes up for with her oversized role as the scion of, and figurehead for, a post-Trump Republican Party — one defined by lunacy, bigotry, and bombast, which she is able to channel and focus through her ability to be utterly shameless in the pursuit of attention and outrage.
What I mean is that for someone with no committee seat, a single congressional vote, and an uncanny penchant for alienating even her fellow conservative colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene sure seems confident about her ability to shut down one of the major tentpole industries in the United States.
Speaking with Fox News's Tucker Carlson (who else?) on Tuesday evening, Greene vowed to "shut down" any telecommunications company that complies with a request from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to preserve the phone records of lawmakers involved in that rally-turned-riot. The committee has also asked a number of social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to turn over various documents relating to the coup attempt.
"These telecommunication companies — if they go along with this, they will be shut down," Greene told Carlson, suggesting Republicans will simply put any company complying with a congressional request out of business entirely should the Democrats lose the House.
"That’s a promise," she added.
"Good," Carlson responded. "I hope they're afraid of you. They should be."
"If members of Congress can have their personal cellphone data exposed ... just to hurt us politically in the next election, then we are going into a dangerous place in this country," Greene said elsewhere during her interview, apparently forgetting the months of Donald Trump demanding to see Hillary Clinton's emails, or the fact that Trump once read GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham's cellphone number out loud on national television, in order to damage his then-primary rival in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In fairness, Greene's huffy bloviating makes a degree of sense when you consider that hers are reportedly among the records the House committee has asked the telecom companies to preserve, along with those from fellow seditionist Reps. Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, and Madison Cawthorn. This raises the question: Is hiding what she said during the insurrection attempt really so important that it's worth tanking an entire industry over? I guess we'll find out.
