Marjorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing US congresswoman, has said she will try to oust House speaker Mike Johnson next week, escalating a civil war within the Republican party that has flared up again after Congress approved a sweeping aid package for Ukraine.
Ms Greene, an ally of Donald Trump, has been threatening for weeks to trigger a vote to strip Mr Johnson of the speakership, but put a timeframe on it for the first time on Wednesday, telling reporters that she would go ahead with the plan next week.
“I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may,” Ms Greene said outside the US Capitol building.
Mr Johnson is expected to survive the vote because Democrats in the House of Representatives have pledged to support him after he defied his party and agreed to put the Ukraine bill up for a vote after months of delay. But Ms Greene’s intervention will expose the huge fracture within the Republican party between hardline members and those who are more willing to strike compromises with Democrats.
Mr Johnson condemned the move by his Republican colleague. “This motion is wrong for the Republican Conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country,” he said in a statement.
Mr Trump has not joined Ms Greene’s call to oust Mr Johnson, and many of his other Republican backers on Capitol Hill have also been reluctant to join the campaign against the speaker. With the election looming in little more than six months, many Republicans are keen to project more unity so they can preserve their very slim majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
Ms Greene, a representative from Georgia, criticised her Republican peers for participating in what she described on Wednesday as the “uniparty” of joint governance with the Democrats.
“The uniparty is all about funding every single foreign war,” Ms Greene said, brandishing a blue-and-yellow Make Ukraine Great Again cap, a version of Trump’s traditional red-and-white Make America Great Again cap.
The latest furore over Mr Johnson’s fate as speaker comes just six months after Republican lawmakers backed the Louisiana congressman for the job as an unexpected compromise after the removal of Kevin McCarthy, the previous Republican speaker, from his job.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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