Who’s to blame for the GOP’s dwindling House majority? It depends on whom you ask.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) made waves last month when she pointed fingers at a pair of fellow Republicans who decided recently to quit Congress before their terms were up, reducing the party’s already slim advantage to a hairline one-vote margin.
Yet Greene declined to mention a third lawmaker who dashed for the exits prematurely: former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a close ally of Greene who resigned his seat in December after conservatives booted him from the Speakership two months earlier.
McCarthy’s high-profile resignation has incensed some of the hard-liners in the GOP conference, who are accusing him of abandoning the party ahead of a high-stakes election cycle when control of the lower chamber is up for grabs.
“After our former Speaker left us,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told reporters recently, “it kind of left us a little bit in the lurch.”
The internal blame game has highlighted both the deep divisions dogging the House GOP — where conservative agitators are bashing moderates as apostates, and moderates are bashing the hard-liners as obstructionists — and the minuscule majority that’s made it all but impossible for Republican leaders to unite the warring camps for the sake of passing the party’s policy priorities.
The tit-for-tat is, in a way, a continuation of the bitter battle that broke out over McCarthy’s ouster in October, which pitted allies of the California Republican — Greene, for one — against the eight GOP rabble-rousers who voted to remove him, including Burchett.
Those tensions have continued to simmer in the months following McCarthy’s dismissal, and they are only expected to become more pronounced as the exodus of GOP lawmakers continues.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4564432-republican-blame-game-majority/