Liz Cheney, under attack by many of her Republican colleagues, could lose her leadership position.
The Wyoming congressman knew she was challenging the basis of her party by voting for President Trump’s accusation, and she was fighting back.
Now there is a very different kind of fighting in the House. Georgia’s newly elected congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing a severe setback for offensive Facebook posts before entering politics.
As was first reported by CNN, Greene, a Q’Anon fan, likes a remark that the fastest way to remove Nancy Pelosi was with a ‘bullet in the head’. Greene also agrees that FBI agents should be executed as part of the ‘Deep State’.
What’s more, when Greene wrote about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the nuclear deal in Iran, a commentator said, “Now can we hang them? Meaning H&O ???” Greene replied: “The stage is being presented. Players are being brought in. We have to be patient.”
The reaction of the leadership? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he would speak to Greene.
In fairness, McCarthy is also against suspending Cheney from her No. 3 leadership position. He’s a man trying to hold a broken caucus together. But he unfortunately expressed that Cheney did not trust her accusation post in advance.
In turn, Greene issued a statement:
“Over the years, some of my people have run my pages. Many posts have been loved. Many posts have been shared. Some have not represented my views. Especially those that CNN is going to spread on the internet.”
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No expression of horror, no condemnation of the death threats. Only that some of what was placed in her name may have been written by others.
Pelosi was obviously critical. “What worries me is the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, which is prepared to overlook the statements, ignoring the statements,” she told reporters on Monday.
In a fundamental way, the two women represent opposite wings of the GOP in the post-Trump era.
As the former vice president’s daughter, Cheney has long been at odds with Trump, who has opposed the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But the January 6 riot at the Capitol took for the congresswoman to break so clean.
Anti-Cheney Republicans claim they have 115 of their 211 members to remove her from the leadership, although they have not yet released a list. Voting for them to oust Trump is for them an unforgivable offense to be punished. And their argument – that Cheney is out of step with the caucus – may be true, given Trump’s hold on the party.
Yet the party does not want to be in a hurry to punish Greene. A Democrat, Jimmy Gomez, has called for her to be expelled from the House. Greene condemned the violence of the Capitol and blamed without evidence the “Antifa / BLM terrorism” and what his “accomplices” call: Vice President Harris, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Georgia legislature is embroiled in other controversies. CNN unveiled a video from last year showing Greene following Parkland High School who shot survivor David Hogg as he walked to the Capitol to work on gun control. She is seen asking him a series of questions and then saying “he is a coward.”
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Earlier this week, Greene had a sheriff’s deputy expel a local news crew from a town hall after a reporter tried to ask a question, even though the media was invited and the station had credentials for the event.
So far, at least I’ve not seen any conservatives in the air defending Greene since she was denounced by liberal commentators. The Republican Party is fighting a fierce battle for the future as its two factions fight for supremacy in the wake of the Trump years. The treatment of Cheney and Greene will help a lot to solve the question.