Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gave a scathing point-by-point pitch to her colleagues on why she believes House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is unfit to wield the gavel, claiming his time as speaker has been a “complete and total surrender” to the Democrats.
In a five-page “Dear Colleague” letter sent Tuesday morning, the day the House is set to come back into session, Greene attempted to make a case for the motion to vacate Johnson that she filed the day the House passed the final bundle of government funding bills.
Throughout the letter, she accuses Johnson of fully funding “abortion, the trans agenda, the climate agenda, foreign wars, and Biden’s border crisis.”
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She claimed the Louisiana Republican is selling the conference out to the Democrats and that if he is the leader Republicans want to claim, she will “neither support nor take part in any of that, and neither will the people we represent.”
“I will not tolerate our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them achieve their policies that are destroying our country,” she said in the letter. “He is throwing our own razor-thin majority into chaos by not serving his own GOP conference that elected him. Nothing says shooting within our own tent like a Republican Speaker of the House who makes his rank-and-file Members vote to fund full-term abortion in order to pay our military soldiers.”
While her arguments and criticisms echo the ones she’s been making for the past two weeks, the letter is her most adamant effort yet to persuade her colleagues why they should put pressure on Johnson or support her resolution to throw him out.
During Johnson’s tenure as speaker, Greene has been a thorn in his side, criticizing his every move as he has continued to pass legislation not supported by the far right wing of his conference. She hasn’t been alone; most hardline conservatives have joined her in criticizing the speaker, though they have stopped short of calling for his removal.
Greene’s letter listed each of the policy failures she has identified and compared them to the seven tenets Johnson laid out to the conference when he was first running for speaker back in October. The Louisiana Republican said these tenets would guide his leadership if he was elected speaker, but Greene claims Johnson has not held up these promises.
“Mike Johnson has unfortunately not lived up to a single one of his self-imposed tenets,” Greene wrote.
Now Greene’s motion to vacate could very well come to a head as the House is set to take up a bill this week to reauthorize section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a powerful spy tool that allows the federal government to surveil foreigners without a warrant for national security purposes.
Johnson is under great pressure from those in his conference to overhaul FISA by requiring a warrant each time the government wants to use the spy tool, which the speaker has indicated he is against doing. But refusing to implement these reforms could pose grave trouble for Johnson, as Greene has publicly—and other Republicans have privately—warned.
“I hope Speaker Johnson ensures any bill to reauthorize FISA includes a warrant requirement,” she wrote Tuesday.
