House cans Marjorie Taylor Greene’s gambit to remove Speaker Mike Johnson

WASHINGTON (CN) — The House shot down Wednesday evening Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bid to oust Speaker Mike Johnson — quashing the second effort in less than a year to remove the chamber’s top lawmaker.

House Democrats, as they had promised, swooped in to save Johnson’s position from the Georgia Republican’s motion to vacate. The lower chamber voted 359-43 to dismiss the measure, with most Republicans joining Democrats to keep the speaker at his post.

Greene has long slammed Johnson, who assumed the House gavel last fall after the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for working alongside Democrats rather than advancing the GOP majority’s policy priorities.

Reading from her motion on the House floor Wednesday evening, the lawmaker said Johnson “has aided and abetted the Democrats and the Biden administration,” pointing, among other things, to his work on the recently enacted 2024 federal budget and a roughly $95 billion foreign aid package.

“Speaker Johnson’s tenure is defined by one self-serving characteristic,” Greene said. “When given a choice of advancing Republican priorities or aligning with Democrats to preserve his own personal power, Johnson regularly chooses to align himself with Democrats.”

The Wednesday evening vote dusting Greene’s motion was one of the House’s last acts for the week — chamber leadership canceled votes scheduled for Thursday and lawmakers were expected to leave Washington Wednesday night.

The Georgia lawmaker struggled through her address to the House floor as she was repeatedly interrupted by jeers and interjections from her colleagues. It’s unclear whether Democrats were responsible for derailing her speech or if there were Republicans involved.

Although her measure was widely regarded as doomed to fail, Greene enjoyed several days of close media attention after she announced last week that she planned to bring her motion up for a vote. The lawmaker met twice earlier this week with Johnson, with some speculation that those marathon conversations had softened her stance.

Democrats said last week that they would reach across the aisle to vote down any bid to remove Johnson from the speakership, a fact that Greene and her colleague Representative Thomas Massie were keen to point out during a news conference last week.

“He's clinging to power by clinging to Democrats,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters.

Greene first introduced her motion to vacate Johnson from the speakership last month following the full-year budget vote, but reserved the right to bring it forward, framing the measure as a warning to the Republican leader.

It’s the second time a member of the slim Republican House majority has attempted to remove the caucus’s top lawmaker. A coalition of conservatives in September succeeded in removing former Speaker McCarthy, citing similar complaints about bipartisanship. McCarthy has since retired from Congress.

That time, Democrats banded together with the angry Republican cohort to give McCarthy the boot.

This is a developing story and will be updated …

Follow @BenjaminSWeiss

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