In defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene (Well, Kind of)

by | Feb 5, 2021 | Editor's Blog | 9 comments

Ok, here’s my unpopular opinion. Marjorie Taylor Greene should not have been stripped of her committee assignments. Sure, what she said is repugnant and she should be ostracized and ridiculed. However, the people of her district elected her and they should be the ones to punish her by throwing her out of office in two years. 

The First Amendment protects Greene’s right to make obnoxious, racist, and offensive statements. She made them before she was elected or even a candidate. If her opponents in the primary and general election didn’t bring up her crazy and hateful rhetoric, that was a failure on their part. If they did and the voters didn’t care, that’s the price we pay for democracy. 

It would be different if she were a sitting Member of Congress when she was spouting her hateful, stupid views. Then, she’s bringing disrepute to the House of Representatives. Because she made those statements before she was elected, they should be protected, regardless of how repugnant they may be. 

The move also sets a terrible precedent in the age of social media. How many future Members of Congress are going to get committees assignments stripped for stupid things they said on Facebook or Twitter when they were much younger and immature? Greene will be the excuse for partisan or vindictive behavior for a long time to come. 

In addition, Democrats are creating a martyr for a bunch of people who already believe they are victims. Greene’s punishment just validates their views that the elites are out to get them. She will use the move to strengthen her position within the GOP. 

A better move would have been to publicized her statements and positions every time she opened her mouth. She could have been a punching bag and object of ridicule on her committees while embarrassing all of her GOP colleagues. The things she says in an official setting could be far more damaging than what she’s going to say outside of the context of her Congressional duties. 

I believe the answer to repugnant speech is more speech. Expose her. Don’t censor her. I don’t believe Congress should punish Greene for what she says or believes. That’s why we have elections. If voters continue to choose her to represent them, then she’s a symbol of the problems we need to overcome. Silencing her by stripping her from committee assignments is the equivalent of sweeping the problem under the rug. We should hear what she says in her official capacity. We already know what she believes. Allowing her to speak will likely make the case for rejecting her.

9 Comments

  1. Rick Gunter

    Thomas,
    Congresswoman Greene has caused me some fretful nights, frankly. She tests my views on dissent, hateful speech and the like. It give all those rights very wide latitude.

    It also bothers me that those people in her Georgis district elected her. I really have a feeling that they have been radicalized, too, and that is frightening.

    But what you omit, and perhaps I need to reread your words, is that the not-s0-gentle congresswoman participated in inciting the Capitol riot. On that ground alone, she should not only lose her committee assignments, but be expelled. There is clear precedent for such punitive action.

    I don’t like seeing the majority running around overturning elections. It cannot be written enough that she was elected by a vote of the people. The people can be grievously wrong, as they were in this case. But she was elected. The rub is that she crossed the line into incitement of this riot, which I consider simply so egregious that words cannot adequately summon the shame it should cause. Everyone from Trump down who had any role in this treachery should be punished. This includes the congresswoman from Georgia. And it should include the former president of the United States. If the Republicans don’t have the balls to do so, what on earth would Mr. Trump have had to do to merit conviction and the sanction that he is done seeking or holding public trust?

  2. Lee Mortimer

    The overlooked question is whether Greene’s district “elected her” and if she actually “represents” its voters. Georgia-14 is overwhelmingly Republican, so whichever Republican wins the primary is guaranteed election in November. Low-turnout partisan primaries are dominated by a party’s most zealous voters. Greene received 40% in the first primary, then won 57% to 43% against her nearest opponent in a runoff. It’s really more accurate to say Greene “was elected by” and “represents” the district’s most zealous Republican voters.

    Last November, Alaska voters approved a new election method that would change that calculus. Instead of each party advancing one primary winner, the “top four” candidates in an open primary, from any party, will compete in the general election. Thus, if 60% of GA-14 Republicans — plus all the district’s Democrats — had qualms about Marjorie Greene’s extremist views, they’d have a second chance to revise the outcome. Ranked-choice voting in the general election would avoid vote-splitting and a “spoiler” outcome.

    Publications like The Atlantic are calling Alaska’s Proposition 2 “the political-reform movement’s biggest win yet.” It’s being touted as a way of inoculating Trump critics like Sen. Lisa Murkowski against being “primaried” by pro-Trump challengers. North Carolina has our own version of a “top-four open primary” in HB 994, introduced by Rep. Marcia Morey and six co-sponsors. The real “answer” is to let all the voters of a district decide, and not just a zealous minority in low-turnout, partisan primaries.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/congress-reform-ranked-choice-voting/617821/

    https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2019/H994/True

  3. cbdavismd

    Thomas,
    thank you for speaking up fro free speech. Restraint and focus on actions, not tit for tat use of politics to silence others is a more genuine effort towards unity. Efforts to legislate or silence thought is exactly what many people fear. Negative attention plays perfectly into the Qanon/trump playbook, while validating their appeal to many of the less rabid of the 74 million, that just were wanting to shake up corrupt washington a little.
    charles

  4. ctw

    Bad take. No effort or expense should be spared to block any influence this deplorable person has in any context. Block/cancel/erase/ruin/destroy.

  5. Norma Munn

    I agree in principal but this is a time when a lot of past understandings are being shown not to be adequate, starting with assuming that no person like Trump could ever be president, and if he or she was, the office and Congress could limit their conduct.
    I suspect that had the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol not occurred, the Democrats might not have taken this step. Many in the Capitol, if not most, were genuinely frightened for hours. I think it was a legitimate fear given what we saw and the deaths that did occur.
    It is also highly unlikely that the fact that there are no known public comments during the campaign similar to those she is repeatedly seen making for a couple of years prior to the campaign means that she has changed her outlook. Even if her voters agree, which doubtless many do, that does not mean that Congress should accept in their midst someone who publicly announces support for murdering other members of Congress.
    Of course, the Republicans could have simply not put her on any committees, which would have created an uproar, but I’m pretty sure it is fully within the rules. Given their leadership, that was never likely.
    The lesson I take from this is that fear, like hunger, can overcome principal. It is lesson we are probably going to see repeated as we try to mend and find more common ground in this country.

  6. j bengel

    “A better move would have been to publicized her statements and positions every time she opened her mouth. She could have been a punching bag and object of ridicule on her committees while embarrassing all of her GOP colleagues.”

    Assumes facts not in evidence. First of all, we just spent four years publicizing every malignant word that fell from Donald Trump’s pie hole, and 74 million people decided it was a feature, not a bug. Marjorie Taylor Greene will never be an embarrassment to her GOP colleagues, because they are incapable of being embarrassed. To be embarrassed requires some sense of shame, and the GOP long ago abandoned even the pretense of that.

    Greene is no mere nut job. She is a DANGEROUS nut job, who won her general election through a campaign of fear that literally drove her Democratic opponent to leave the state out of fear for his life. Her right to self expression ends at the point where she becomes a danger to others.

    If the GOP caucus had any spine at all, they would not only have removed her from her committee appointments, but expelled her from the House entirely. They won’t, because as my old college advisor once said of another group, “They haven’t one ball among ‘em”.

    To expect congressional Republicans to do the honorable thing is naïveté eon the order of absurdity. And appeasement will work just about as well with them as it did for Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s. They have demonstrated their bad faith time after time for decades, and at some point have to start believing them when they tell you who they are. This dystopian hellscape we’re standing on the edge of is largely of their making, either through action or (more often) inaction. And now they can lead, follow or d aside and let the adults talk. But the time to coddle them is well past over. And if Our Lady of Perpetual Persecution, Q Barbie doesn’t like being held to account, the she’s welcome to go back to Deliveranceville.

  7. John Rudisill

    What about her comments about killing Democrats? Is that not enough to impeach here, even if the voters of Deliverance Country like the idea of assassinating legislators? Stripping her committee assignments seems pretty light punishment for someone who advocated your death.

  8. Lane Sarver

    Well said. The Democrats have made her a martyr and made themselves look like the vindictive thought police that the right wing accuses them of being.

  9. Ted Harrisin

    Sorry to disagree. Just because GA voters approve of her is not enough reason for her to inflict her views on the rest of the electorate. True she is a member, but the institution must have some rules and responsibilities.

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