Infighting among House Republicans reached a new low Thursday, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) unleashing an insult-laden tirade against her GOP colleagues after her bid to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) fell flat on Wednesday.
Among the insults hurled by Greene on Twitter was to refer to her new nemesis Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) as “vaping groping Lauren” and to bizarrely call Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) “Colonel Sanders” after he, along with 23 other Republicans, refused to vote in favor of censuring Tlaib for her anti-Israel comments.
It wasn’t House Republicans’ only ugly spat on Thursday. After Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) joked about Rep. George Santos (R-NY) surviving an expulsion vote on Wednesday, Santos penned a nasty tweet about Womack’s 36-year-old son’s recent arrest on drug and gun charges.
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“Instead of being home, taking care of your son, you’re sitting pretty in the swamp,” Santos wrote. “Listen, I have been respectful of my colleagues through this process but I’m sick and tired of people with glass houses casting stones at me.”
Boebert did vote in favor of censuring Tlaib on Wednesday but was nonetheless swept up in Greene’s temper tantrum. Otherwise, she centered her ire on the Republicans who didn’t fall in line with her crusade against Tlaib, who she called “Terrorist Tlaib.”
“Our country is in the worst crisis in it’s [sic] history in every category and the Democrats are full blown communists and Republicans can’t even censure Rashida Tlaib,” Greene fumed online. “Conservatives on this list hide behind excuses with their white wigs on and quote the constitution.”
Greene said that Roy, an unabashed MAGA Republican and a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus (which booted Greene in July for denigrating colleagues), “hate[s] Trump, certified Biden’s election, and could care less about J6 defendants being persecuted.”
In response, Roy explained that he felt he couldn’t vote in favor of Tlaib’s censure because the resolution penned by Greene was “deeply flawed.” He added that her writing was littered with “factually unverified claims,” namely that Tlaib led an “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol.
“In January 2021, the legal term insurrection was stretched and abused by many following the events at the Capitol,” Roy said in a statement. “We should not continue to perpetuate ‘insurrection’ at the Capitol and we should not abuse the term now.”
Greene responded to Roy’s statement in typically classy fashion—hurling insults and claiming that Roy, who has represented a portion of San Antonio and Austin since 2018 after a stint as Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief of staff, is “not even from Texas.”
“Oh shut up Colonel Sanders, you’re not even from Texas, more like the DMV,” Greene wrote, referring to the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area. “Chip Roy’s career exist of working for politicians, working for campaigns for politicians, and being a politician himself. Unity Party all the way! Which is why you will never hold anyone accountable.”
In a comment to The Hill on Thursday, Roy told Greene to “go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing”—a reference to Greene’s previous antisemitic rants.
Also caught up in Thursday’s drama was Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who Greene called a “CNN wannabe” supported by Roy. Just a day before, Buck announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election, largely because he’s fed up with House Republicans’ lack of policy priorities.
He flamed his own party in an interview with The New York Times, saying, “We lost our way.” It came three weeks after Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) announced the same, saying “Washington is broken.”
House Republicans appear to be as fractured as they’ve ever been. After the knifing of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Speaker of the House last month, the party spent weeks bickering over who should replace him—eventually settling on Mike Johnson (R-LA), a far-right, election-denying, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-gun, ultra-religious Republican.
Boebert was active on social media on Thursday morning, but didn’t address Greene’s insult, which referred to a September incident in which Boebert was kicked out of a Beetlejuice performance after security cameras captured her vaping and groping her date mid-show.
Greene survived a threat of censure of her own Wednesday—introduced and withdrawn by Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT)—for fanning the flames of “racism, antisemitism, LGBTQ hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, xenophobia, and other forms of hatred.”
While he wasn’t called out by name—or personally insulted—by Greene, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) cited the importance of free speech as the reason he voted against censuring Tlaib.
“As much as I disagree with previous comments made by Rep. Tlaib, First Amendment liberties are for every American, and I will support this constitutional right, whether the speaker is on the political left or right and whether they are speaking heinous lies or harsh truths,” he said.
The full list of Republicans to vote against the censure included: Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), Rep. John Duarte (R-CA), Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), Rep. Richard McCormick (R-GA), Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA), Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN), Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), as well as Walberg, Buck, and Roy. (Orden later reversed his vote.)
