Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.
Until now.
The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome. The HFC says it does not comment on membership, and Greene released a statement that did not specifically address the expulsion but said, “In Congress, I serve Northwest Georgia first, and serve no group in Washington.”
[Read: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]
Greene was not ejected for subscribing to QAnon beliefs, or for encouraging violence against colleagues, or for blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers, or for supporting Vladimir Putin. Instead, Harris said, Greene was punished for tangling with her fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert of Colorado and daring to take a minimal step toward governance by aligning herself with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a conservative Republican. The vote shows just how radical the MAGA fringe in Congress is today—a wild-eyed clique implacably opposed to governance.
When Greene entered Congress in 2021, she was viewed, correctly, as wacky and toxic. In February of that year, Democrats moved to kick her out of her formal committee assignments after McCarthy hesitated to punish her for offensive remarks. But Greene used the ensuing two years to build her power within the party. She forged an alliance with McCarthy: It saved her from pariahdom and made her a major face of the party, and it gave him credibility (or at least cover) with right-wing members. When his bid for the speakership nearly faltered in January 2023, she was a crucial backer. And when McCarthy needed votes for the debt deal he struck with President Joe Biden in May, Greene was there.
But the closeness to McCarthy, whom the right views as an unreliable and moderate speaker, and support for the debt deal was too much for her HFC colleagues to bear, according to Politico’s reporting. The fury over the debt deal is silly. McCarthy never had much leverage to bring against Biden, and he managed to extract more from the White House than many Democrats would have liked. The alternative to the deal he struck wasn’t a better deal—it was a catastrophic national default. Greene’s sin, to HFC members, was insufficient nihilism.
[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]
The idea that Greene has become some sort of moderate is belied by the other reason she was kicked out. Last month on the House floor, she called Boebert “a little bitch”—amid a disagreement over competing resolutions to impeach Biden. (A typically unrepentant Greene defended her word choice to Semafor, explaining, “She has genuinely been a nasty little bitch to me.” Boebert, for her part, said that she had defended Greene’s comments on free-speech grounds ahead of the caucus vote.)
Greene is as extreme as she ever has been, but she became prominent not just for her “loony lies and conspiracy theories”—to use Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s phrase—but for her savvy wielding of those views in the press to get attention. But some of the remaining members of the Freedom Caucus, although not so well known, have terrifying views of their own.
The chair, Scott Perry, a Pennsylvanian, was a key plotter of Donald Trump’s attempted paperwork coup to steal the 2020 election, and has been swept up in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chief inquisitor of the House majority, is the vice chair. Andy Biggs of Arizona responded to Donald Trump’s federal indictment in June by tweeting, “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” His colleague Clay Higgins of Louisiana outdid him with a mélange of militia vernacular incomprehensible to the average citizen. Mary Miller of Illinois first reached national attention in 2021 when she told rally attendees, “Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” She may not have intended to praise Hitler; the same cannot safely be assumed about Paul Gosar of Arizona, who is deeply entwined with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Matt Gaetz of Florida is, well, Matt Gaetz.
[Jeff Sharlet: The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up”]
When Greene was kicked off her committees back in 2021, I argued that the GOP was disingenuously treating her as one lone, unhinged figure who could be ignored. The problem for Republican leaders was that they couldn’t very well punish her for views that the party had tolerated and fostered.
A little more than two years later, the center of the House congressional caucus has moved so far that Greene is no longer a fringe member—in fact, the fringe members view her as an avatar of compromise and weakness. That’s no longer just a problem for Republican leaders. It’s a problem for the entire country.