First, MTG is too chickenshit to pull the trigger on getting rid of Pastor Johnson. I think Josh Marshall has it right:
Majorie Greene was on social media all weekend going completely berserk on Johnson, threatening him, denouncing him, everything. And yet she still hasn’t pulled the plug on his Speakership, which she could do at any moment. Maybe this will all change tomorrow or the next day. But at the moment Johnson has totally stood her and her crew down. It was all talk basically.
One possible rejoinder is that she isn’t doing it because Johnson has a deal with Democrats to backstop his Speakership. So what’s the point of her calling the vote?
Maybe. But in her position making him retain the Speakership with Democratic votes is like making him drink from a poisoned chalice. So why not do it? The best answer is that Republicans are already facing a very challenging election in the House. A month of chaos looking for yet another Speaker only makes that worse. And none of her colleagues really want that. She probably doesn’t even want it. I think we underestimate the degree to which last October’s spectacle was driven by the personal and impetuous actions of a single man: Matt Gaetz. Others joined once he did it. But it’s not clear to me that the others were ever going to pull to do it themselves.
On last week’s Josh Marshall podcast, he also made the point that Marge isn’t a suicide machine like Gaetz: she wants to wield power, and being a spoiler at this particular moment is going to hurt her future in the House.
Let’s turn to Ronald Reagan’s party of the big tent in Colorado, specifically CO-4 where Boebert is trying to parachute in. Dave Williams, the chair of the party, has filed a subpoena of one of Boebert’s opponents in CO-4 as part of a lawsuit to stop unaffiliated voters from voting in the primary, even though a 2016 ballot proposition allows them to. Unaffiliated voters are 40% of voter registration statewide. Williams is also a candidate for the now open seat in CO-5, which is basically Colorado Springs. He is accused of using state party money to finance his congressional campaign. Need I say he’s the MAGat in that race?
Polls show Boebert in a lead in the primary contest, but I would put little or no stock in them, since it is a safe Republican district that was never worth polling. When I posted about Boebert’s endorsement from the state party, some Coloradans in the comments thought that the endorsement meant nothing, and the voters of CO-4 would reject Boebert. What’s for sure is that the Republicans in CO-4 are in deep disarray and showing their natural desire to disenfranchise voters.
(Democrats are also fighting over the CO-4 seat, with the eligibility of the Democrat chosen to run in the special election being challenged by a voter who won’t say who’s backing him. )