“@NancyMace is the trash in the GOP Conference,” tweeted the Georgia Republican about her colleague from South Carolina on Tuesday morning. “Never attacked by Democrats or RINO’s (same thing) because she is not conservative, she’s pro-abort. Mace you can back up off of @laurenboebert or just go hang with your real gal pals, the Jihad Squad. Your out of your league.”
Which, wow.
That tweet contains multitudes — including, yes, an epic misspelling. (“Honestly the your/you’re thing is funny, it’s really a bad way to end this tweet,” wrote Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger in the replies to the Greene tweet. “Now we all just see that you can’t spell.”)
And, it led to this response from Mace: “This is what [bat emoji, poop emoji, clown emoji] looks like.” (If you need me to explain what those emojis mean, well, just think about it for a minute. Got it? Good!)
What provoked all of this? It appears that Mace’s decision to condemn Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert for suggesting that Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar is a terrorist was the trigger. “I have time after time condemned my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for racist tropes and remarks that I find disgusting and this is no different than any others,” Mace told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins over the weekend.
Boebert and Omar talked Monday in an attempted reconciliation but that call ended acrimoniously with Omar hanging up on Boebert, who then released a video on Instagram in which she said that she “will fearlessly continue to put America first, never sympathizing with terrorists” and “unfortunately Ilhan can’t say the same thing and our country is worse off for it.”
Greene’s decision to turn the fight between Boebert and Omar into a Republican-on-Republican scuffle is in keeping with her strategy — if it can be called that — of late.
Over the Thanksgiving break, Greene drew headlines for questioning House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s tactics in regards to the 13 House Republicans who voted for the $1 trillion infrastructure package signed into law by President Joe Biden.
“We know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference. He doesn’t have the full support to be speaker,” Greene said on Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s podcast late last week. “He doesn’t have the votes that are there, because there’s many of us that are very unhappy about the failure to hold Republicans accountable, while conservatives like me, Paul Gosar, and many others just constantly take the abuse by the Democrats.”
The following day, McCarthy and Greene spoke by phone, after which the Georgia Republican pronounced herself happy with “what he has planned ahead.”
McCarthy’s scramble to accommodate Greene speaks to his desperation to stay on the right side of Republican lawmakers close to former President Donald Trump. McCarthy clearly believes that his path to the Speakership — if Republicans, as expected, take back the House majority next fall — runs through the likes of Greene and Boebert.
There’s a risk there, of course. The more deference McCarthy pays to his right flank, the more alienated less, um, radical elements within his party get.
“He’s taking the middle of the conference for granted,” a moderate GOP lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal conference dynamics, told CNN over the weekend. “McCarthy could have a bigger math problem with the moderates.”
Either way, there’s nothing to be gained by Republicans with this battle royal among Greene, Boebert, Mace and Kinzinger. It looks petty and dumb — at a time when the country may well be bracing for another Covid-19 surge and inflation continues to plague the economic recovery.
