The mainstreaming of Marjorie Taylor Greene

A purposeful pivot.

Less than two years ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene was spending her time purposefully wasting the time of her colleagues.

Four times in the space of two weeks in the spring of 2021, the freshman Georgia congresswoman called for a motion to adjourn the House.

Her goal was simple: To force every member of Congress to appear on the House floor to defeat her motion and to keep the House in session. And her ire was aimed primarily at Republicans.

“Unfortunately there are some Republicans that are unhappy with these type of floor procedures because it messes up their schedule,” Greene said of her gambit. “But Republican voters really don’t like that type of Republican mentality up here. They really want Republicans to stand up and stop these radical crazy policies.”

Why did Greene really do it? Because she had nothing to lose. In February 2021 she had been removed from all of her House committees after a series of, er, inflammatory comments that she had made in the run-up to her 2020 congressional bid came to light.

Greene was, effectively, a pariah. She was loathed by Democrats and barely tolerated by her fellow Republicans, who viewed her as a grandstander with little interest in doing the actual work that being a member of Congress demands.

The motions to adjourn were in keeping with Greene’s MO up to that point: She seemed far more interested in tactics that would deliver her more fundraising dollars from the GOP base and more TV hits on Fox News (and other, further right outfits) than she was in, you know, legislating.

Fast forward to Tuesday when Greene was named to the House Homeland Security and Oversight Committees, without a peep from her Republican colleagues.

(Much has been made in the immediate aftermath of these appointments that Greene is on record questioning whether parts of 9/11 were a hoax. And her past comments on, um, “Jewish space lasers.” Which, well, yeah.)

How did Greene pull off such a coup? How did she go from an outcast in Congress to a member of the House Republican conference in good standing?

After all, it was less than a year ago that now Speaker Kevin McCarthy condemned MTG (and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar) for speaking at a conference organized by a white nationalist.

“To me, it was appalling and wrong,” McCarthy said at the time. “There’s no place in our party for any of this.”

Part of what changed is that McCarthy realized that he needed MTG more than she needed him. McCarthy was laser-focused on being Speaker and long before the 2022 election, Greene made clear that any path to that job went through her.

“We know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference. He doesn’t have the full support to be Speaker,” Greene said on fellow Rep. Matt Gaetz podcast in the fall of 2021. “He doesn’t have the votes that are there, because there’s many of us that are very unhappy about the failure to hold Republicans accountable, while conservatives like me, Paul Gosar, and many others just constantly take the abuse by the Democrats. The American people aren’t going to have it.”

The message was clear — make me happy, or else.

And McCarthy did just that. When he announced the Republican “Commitment to America” last fall — the latest iteration of the 1994 “Contract with America” — MTG was right over McCarthy’s shoulder, a visual signal that a) he got it and b) he was willing to do whatever it took to get the brass ring of the Speakership.

Greene said the quiet part out loud in an interview with the New York Times around that same time. “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,” she said, noting that “I’ve asked for committee positions, but I’m not doing it with a guaranteed deal.”

But, importantly, the McCarthy-Greene detente was (and is) a two-way street.

Greene could have stayed in her lane as a pure partisan bomb thrower — in the mold of the likes of Gosar.

She clearly is more ambitious than that — as evidenced by her decision to endorse McCarthy for Speaker and, through vote after painful vote, serve as one of his most high profile surrogates.

MTG 1.0 — which, remember, existed less than two years ago in Congress — would have zero interest in making nice with McCarthy. In fact, she purposely positioned herself as an agitator of the Republican party, with her calls to adjourn the House and other over-the-top rhetoric critical of her own side.

MTG 2.0 is a far savvier version of the original, and someone who had quite clearly made the conscious choice that being a backbench bomb thrower isn’t enough for her.

It’s easy to focus on McCarthy’s courtship of MTG and the other members of the House Freedom Caucus as proof of his craven willingness to do whatever it took to get to the Speakership.

But, that focus omits the clear and purposeful pivot that Greene has made from her earliest days in Congress.

MTG has clearly changed her approach (and goals) since her first term. She’s more ambitious and more strategic today — and, at least so far, it’s paying major dividends for her.