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CNN
—
It’s a good time to be Marjorie Taylor Greene right about now.
As Republicans appear to have the momentum (again) in the fight for House control, Greene is growing more and more confident in her position within the party.
“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,” Greene told The New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy. “And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it.”
Which sounds a whole lot like a threat! Except it’s not, according to Greene. “That’s not in any way a threat at all,” she said. “I just think that’s reality.”
And Greene’s boasting of the role she would play in a Republican-controlled House comes as Rolling Stone reported that the Georgia Republican could be in the mix for a role in a second Trump administration.
It’s a stark reversal for Greene, who appeared to be a pariah after just a few months in office last year.
In February 2021, the House voted to remove Greene from her committee assignments in the wake of revelations of a series of incendiary and violent statements she had made in the past, including embracing the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.
At that point, it seemed as though Greene would drift into irrelevancy – sidelined from doing much more than forcing occasional time-wasting votes of the full House that angered Republicans as much as Democrats.
That has not happened. Instead, over the past year-plus, Greene has grown more and more powerful – aligning herself firmly with the Trumpist base of the GOP and using her popularity on social media to stay relevant. (Her personal Twitter account was permanently suspended at the beginning of the year for spreading misinformation about Covid-19, but she still has more than 1.1 million followers on her official account.)
She has also demonstrated a fundraising prowess literally unheard of outside of party leaders in the past. From the beginning of 2021 through September 30, 2022, Greene had raised $11.6 million for her non-competitive reelection bid in a safe GOP seat.
As it’s become clearer and clearer that neither Trump nor his most prominent congressional acolytes are going anywhere in the Republican Party, Greene has found herself on the receiving end of a charm offensive from McCarthy.
Greene was at the public unveiling of the House Republicans’ “Commitment to America” plan in Pennsylvania last month, standing right behind McCarthy in the camera shot. And she made a trip to the southern border with the McCarthy earlier this year.
Draper even reported that McCarthy has floated the idea of creating a role in leadership for Greene. She coyly deflected: “I don’t have to have a leadership position. I think I already have one, without having one.”
The Point: The last 20 months have been filled with ups and downs for Greene. But there’s no question that, with the midterm election just weeks away, she is at her most powerful right now.
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