Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exercise in vanity has failed — spectacularly

Tuesday should have been the perfect day for Marjorie Taylor Greene to trigger her motion to vacate. It had been more than a week since the House had voted on the foreign aid package that provided assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. That vote allowed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to blast isolationists in the Republican party and gloat at their diminished power. MTG was poised to bite back.

Instead, on Tuesday, Democrats threw House Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar all said they would join in a motion to table Greene’s motion, specifically citing the right-wing conspiracy theorist from Georgia as their reason for doing so.

On top of that, many of hellraisers who joined Representative Matt Gaetz’s coup against Kevin McCarthy in October seemed wholly uninterested in knocking a speaker off his perch now. Eli Crane of Arizona told me, “I’m done talking about it right now,” when I pressed him on the issue in Congress. Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana said, “I think about everything that comes before us. [That motion] hasn't come before us, though.” Neither man voted to make McCarthy speaker in January last year, so their staying mum shows the base of the GOP is not ready to jump off with Greene.

Meanwhile, Tim Burchett, the genteel Tennessean whom McCarthy infuriated for mocking his faith, said, “If we take Speaker Johnson out, then we will probably have a Democrat or Hakeem-lite.” Nancy Mace of South Carolina simply told me that she thought, of Greene’s efforts: “Why would you pull this stunt when you know it’s not going to pass?”

Even Jamaal Bowman, the Squad member whom the House Republican