In this day and age we don’t pay as much attention to regional differences as we do to race, gender and party. But it’s worth noting that on what may be the most important votes of their political careers, Georgia’s congressional delegation broke down on clear regional lines.
Regardless of party, every member representing the 12 districts from Atlanta south to the Florida line voted Saturday for the aid packages to Israel and Taiwan. Only the two members whose districts span the Tennessee line, Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene, voted against all three aid packages.
On the most critical of the the day’s votes, the aid package to Ukraine, Clyde and Greene were joined by three Republicans from adjoining districts, Rick Allen, Barry Loudermilk and Mike Collins, forming a half circle around Atlanta from Ringgold to Augusta.
After one of her amendments failed Saturday, Greene posted a list of the 139 Republicans “who just voted against my amendment to strip every penny of your tax dollars from Mike Johnson’s $61 BILLION Ukraine war spending bill.” The list included five of her eight Georgia Republican colleagues.
Greene said that after the votes, she would wait until her GOP colleagues went home and hear how angry their voters were about the funding bills before calling for a vote to unseat House Speaker Mike Johnson, who she said was “already a lame duck.” Maybe so, but judged by Saturday’s votes, a majority of the Georgia Republicans would vote to stick with Johnson.
Greene has been a controversial figure regarding a lot of subjects since she was elected to Congress, but over the weeks leading up to Saturday’s votes, her public image has morphed on both sides of the Atlantic into something much more specific. She has become the face of opposition to U.S. involvement in Ukraine and sympathy for Vladimir Putin. She is now more widely known for that than anything else.
“Speaker Johnson is not the one who is running Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene is running Congress. Everyone is afraid of her,” analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky said last week on Russian state television.
Before Saturday’s vote, there might have been some American analysts who would have agreed with Drobnitsky. After the votes were taken, Greene didn’t look nearly so fearsome. The New York Post, Donald Trump’s favorite newspaper, splashed a doctored photo of Greene in a Russian fur hat on its tabloid front page with the headline “Nyet, Moscow Marjorie.”
What finally turned the tide in favor of the foreign aid bills was the long shadow of history, which their advocates invoked heavily in Saturday’s debate.
“Our adversaries are watching us here today, and history will judge us on our actions here today,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican, said. “So as we deliberate on this vote, you have to ask yourself: Am I Chamberlain or am I Churchill?”
We’ll see what the mood is in Congress when it returns from its recess. As Greene has predicted, the Republicans are likely to hear from some voters outraged over the spending bills. It remains to be seen whether those are the most voices they’ll hear or just the loudest.
For now, the strongest response to the votes on Saturday has been one of relief, not only on the international front but in the halls of Congress. Rep. Thomas Massie derided those who voted for the bills as the “uniparty.” For a lot of people, however, a uniparty sounds better than the fractious party breakdown they’ve seen.
Greene said on a Fox Sunday that Mike Johnson should step down as speaker because he would be vacated anyway. But Johnson’s fate is not nearly as much a foregone conclusion as it seemed to be last week. And since she has not yet actually brought a motion to vacate to the floor for a vote, her comment sounded more like a threat than a guarantee.
