Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s drawing a line in the sand. Though her ally, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is trying to rally the conference around a short-term funding measure to avoid a government shutdown this fall, the far-right Georgia Republican told constituents Thursday that she wouldn’t sign on to any such measure—unless he formally moves to impeach President Joe Biden.
“I will not vote to fund the government unless we have passed an impeachment inquiry” on Biden,” Greene told a town hall audience, adding that she would not support a continuing resolution that includes funding for the “Biden regime’s weaponized government,” COVID vaccines, or Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. “I will be happy to work with all of my colleagues, I will work with the speaker of the House, I will work with everyone,” she said. “But I will not fund those things.”
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The ultimatum—which builds on a list of absurd demands other House Republican extremists have made ahead of the funding fight—could make the prospect of a shutdown more likely. For all their cable news innuendo, Republicans have not appeared to find any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the president, and it’s not clear there’s enough support in the full conference for a formal impeachment push. “I don’t think it’s there at the moment,” as New York Republican Mike Lawler told reporters recently. On the other hand, McCarthy appears to be increasingly open to the idea, telling Fox News last week that impeachment seems a “natural step forward” for House Republicans—and even using the promise of an inquiry to try to dampen opposition to his government funding plan.
“If we shut down,” he said, “all the government shuts it down—investigation and everything else.”
In other words, if Greene’s protest picks up steam, the funding of the government may very well depend on an explicitly political impeachment—one rooted in lies, conjecture, and of course a desire to protect and avenge Donald Trump. “Comparing this to past impeachments isn’t apples to apples or even apples to oranges; it’s apples to elephants,” as a White House aide told NBC News Friday of the administration’s preparations to respond to the expected inquiry. “Never in modern history has an impeachment been based on no evidence whatsoever.”
That obviously isn’t an issue for Greene, who first filed articles of impeachment against Biden the day after he took office: The point of all this isn’t to hold the president accountable for actual wrongdoing, after all; it’s about cheapening the impeachment process that twice ensnared Trump—first over his attempt to extort Ukraine, then over the insurrection he incited in a last-ditch effort to remain in power. McCarthy has spent most of his speakership trying to delay this exercise in political nihilism. But now, he is coming to a fork in the road. “The House Republicans responsible for keeping the government open already made a promise to the American public about government funding,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement Thursday, following Greene’s remarks. “It would be a shame for them to break their word and fail the country because they caved to the hardcore fringe of their party in prioritizing a baseless impeachment stunt over high stakes needs Americans care about deeply.”