Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene may be resigning from Congress next month, but she’s weighing one last act of defiance: a longshot bid to topple Speaker Mike Johnson.
In recent days, the controversial Georgia Republican has been working behind the scenes to gauge whether there’s support for a motion to vacate the chair, three sources familiar with her efforts who spoke on the condition of anonymity told MS NOW.
Under the House rules adopted at the beginning of this year, nine Republicans are needed to trigger such a vote — and Greene is trying to figure out who might be willing to sign on.
“Marjorie is approaching members to get to nine who will oust the speaker,” one of the sources said. “And if we don’t get to work on codifying Trump’s agenda, anything can happen.”
Although several House Republicans have become increasingly frustrated with the speaker, complaining about some of his recent decisions, the sources who talked to MS NOW stressed that Greene’s effort was likely to fail — if she even tries to bring a motion at all.
Asked Thursday about her discussions with colleagues and whether she wanted Johnson removed, Greene told MS NOW she was “not doing interviews on this right now.”
She repeatedly said it was “not true” that she was trying to build support for a motion to vacate. “I’m not interested in participating in your story,” Greene said.
Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
While Greene denied trying to take Johnson down, it’s indisputable that she has become one of his most persistent GOP critics. She railed against his strategy of keeping the House out of town during this year’s government shutdown. She slammed him for not crafting a GOP health care plan to address rising costs. And just this week, she accused him of sidelining women in the conference.
“You’re seeing Republican women lash out directly at the speaker because he sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously,” Greene said during an interview on CNN on Tuesday.
The consternation with Johnson isn’t confined to Greene. One GOP lawmaker, granted anonymity to talk about the internal dynamics of the conference, said “several Republicans are mad at Johnson” and have been discussing a motion to vacate.
Another GOP member, granted anonymity to discuss the general mood with Johnson, said on Thursday they were done with this “closed rule bullshit,” referring to the process by which Republican leaders bring bills to the floor without allowing amendments.
Even Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. — a member of House GOP leadership and once a close ally of Johnson’s — made headlines last week when she told The Wall Street Journal that she didn’t believe Johnson would “have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll call vote tomorrow.”
“I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” Stefanik said. “It’s that widespread.”
But the widespread frustration might not translate into votes. For starters, Greene would need at least eight other lawmakers to join her to force a vote of no confidence — a high bar for a conference that still remembers the three weeks of chaos kicked off by Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster two years ago.
In response to that fiasco, the House GOP changed conference rules last year and increased the threshold to bring a motion to vacate from one member to nine. One of the House Republicans previously quoted raised the prospect of potentially circumventing that new threshold, but they wouldn’t go into specifics and House rules suggest it would be difficult to get around the nine-Republican statute.
Making matters even more difficult, time is running out. Greene has said she will officially resign from office on Jan. 5, leaving her six more legislative days to force a vote before Congress breaks for holiday recess.
And perhaps most challenging of all, Donald Trump remains supportive of Johnson. “I think Mike Johnson is great,” the president said Wednesday.
“Mike Johnson has been a fantastic speaker,” Trump continued, noting that it’s a “very hard job” when you have “a small majority.”
This effort is not Greene’s first attempt at ousting the speaker. Last May, the rabble-rousing Republican — alongside Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. — forced a vote on removing Johnson from his post, a rebuke of the speaker that came after he ushered a foreign aid package for Ukraine through the House.
That attempt failed, however, after a majority of Democrats voted to save Johnson.
But if Greene were able to force a vote, Johnson shouldn’t count on Democrats to rescue him again.
Asked last week what he would tell his members to do if a motion to vacate came to the floor, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., suggested that Democrats would not be as helpful as last time.
“We’d have to have that discussion in terms of what House Democrats might do to the extent there is such a vote,” Jeffries said. “But clearly, nothing that the Speaker of the House has done over the last several months has endeared himself to Democrats in the Congress.”
Matt Fuller contributed to this report.
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