Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, took the first step toward ousting House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday, filing a resolution calling for his removal after he pushed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan spending bill that angered the hard right.
“Today I tabled a motion to withdraw after President Johnson betrayed our convention and violated our rules,” Ms. Green said shortly after the package, which was needed to avert a partial government shutdown after midnight, was passed.
While Ms. Green said she would not seek an immediate vote to oust Mr. Johnson, her move was an extraordinary challenge to his leadership and the second time in less than six months that divided House Republicans have fired their own speaker. .
“It’s more of a warning than a pink slip,” Ms. Green told reporters on the Capitol steps. “We need a new speaker.”
Ms. Green’s resolution, tabled while the spending bill was still being voted on, created a major test for Mr. Johnson and was another tumultuous moment in a vicious year for the House under a split Republican majority. .
Ms. Greene declined to say Friday whether she would seek to invoke a privilege available to any member of the House to force an early vote to remove Mr. Johnson, leaving lawmakers with a litany of questions and uncertainty as depart for a scheduled two-week break. But her resolution at least held out the possibility that Mr. Johnson could become the second Republican speaker to face ouster from his colleagues, less than six months after GOP rebels fired Kevin McCarthy, making him the first who was ever removed from office.
Before the vote began on Friday, Ms. Green stood on the floor of the House to attack the spending bill, calling it a victory for Democrats and aggressive measures that she said funded progressive policies.
“This is not a Republican bill. this is a Chuck Schumer bill, controlled by Democrats,” Ms. Green said on the House floor Friday morning.
And after his vote, he expressed outrage that Mr. Johnson had broken an unwritten but sacred rule among Republicans against introducing any legislation that does not have the support of a majority of their members. Fewer than half of Republicans supported the bill after a rally against it, protesting that it did not sufficiently curb spending or contain the conservative policy demands they had been pushing, including tough restrictions on immigration.
Ms. Green’s move was the culmination of months of discontent among right-wing lawmakers with the leadership of Mr. Johnson, an ultraconservative Republican who won unanimous support to become speaker in October but has angered his right wing by cutting a series of deals with Democrats to keep the government funded.
On the Friday morning before the vote, Ms. Green told Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump administration adviser, during his “War Room” program that she had considered whether or not to seek Mr. Johnson’s impeachment in a “minute- per minute”.
“Our majority has been completely handed over to the Democrats,” Ms Green said on the floor shortly before she tabled her proposal, echoing complaints from far-right members of her party that the spending packages agreed by Mr Johnson were a failure of the majority. their.
“That was our strength. That was our leverage. This was our opportunity to secure the border and he didn’t do it,” Ms Green told reporters before leaving the Capitol on Friday. “It’s treason.”
If put to a vote, Ms. Green’s resolution would mark the second time in more than 100 years that a lawmaker has used a tool more often used as a threat by disgruntled lawmakers against their speaker than as a genuine effort to oust them.
If she moves to force the issue, Ms. Green could face a steep challenge to muster the majority to oust Mr. Johnson. House Republicans are wary of plunging the chamber into another period of chaos like the one that paralyzed the House for weeks after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster.
Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who led the charge to oust Mr. McCarthy, told reporters on Thursday that he would not seek the same fate for Mr. Johnson because he would risk allowing a Democrat to is elected president.
And while Democrats unanimously backed the move to oust Mr. McCarthy last fall, they recently said they would be willing to bail out Mr. Johnson if he faced a similar threat. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, told the New York Times that he believed “a reasonable number” of his fellow Democrats would protect the Republican speaker from removal if he faced a GOP revolt for allowing a vote on a foreign aid bill. which includes money for Ukraine.
Asked Friday about the prospect of Democrats joining a coalition to save the Republican speaker, Mr. Jeffries said his earlier comments were “an observation, not a statement,” adding that he would have to speak to his members ” for the best way. to move.”
Carl Hulse and Luke Broadwater contributed to the report.
