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Marjorie Taylor Greene has launched a furious tirade at House Speaker Mike Johnson after he pushed through legislation to avoid a government shutdown, accusing him of being “a Speaker for the Democrats.”
Johnson defied Donald Trump on Wednesday by letting the House of Representatives vote to approve a spending bill to keep the government funded until December, even though it included no provisions to tighten elections.
Trump had previously called on House Republicans not to agree to a continuing resolution without the Save Act, which claimed it would prevent illegal immigrants from voting. This is even though US law already prohibits such a practice in federal elections.
In response, Taylor Greene said Republicans did not “deserve” to control the House. “Mike Johnson is not our Speaker,” she said. “He is the Speaker for the Democrats,” she told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “I share the anger and frustration, and I don’t think Republicans deserve to be re-elected to hold the majority," the Georgia representative added.
The House voted 341-82 to pass the continuing resolution, which will fund the government at levels set in the fiscal year 2024 budget, through December 20.
In her rant, Taylor Greene said one of Johnson’s failures was greenlighting government funding for the Department of Justice.
“And [Johnson] has delivered that through his actions of fully funding the Biden-Harris administration, fully funding the weaponized DOJ, fully funding the FBI that had agents and was involved in January 6th and raided Mar-a-Lago and has raided a lot of January 6th defendant homes,” she said.
Taylor Greene, who often peddles conspiracy theories and is a fervent Trump supporter, added: “We have to elect president Trump in order to control the federal government, in order to take back all of these huge agencies and departments and set the course right.”
Trump wrote on Truth Social last week: “If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form.”
The former president has not yet responded to the news.
Some conservatives and members of the House Freedom Caucus expressed frustration at the fact that House Republican leadership gave up.
“And I realize he’s got a tough job, but the country’s in tough shape, financially, militarily in every way,” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina told The Independent. “So I will wish he had fought harder, but it is what it is.”
However, Tom Cole, chair for House Appropriations, told The Independent that including the Save Act was not feasible and a government shutdown would be worse.
“My personal opinion is, we were not likely to be able to get that and the government shutdown was not going to be helpful to president Trump, let alone to our efforts to hold on to the House,” he said.
