WHY WE MIGHT NEVER BE RID OF MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

Marjorie Taylor Greene is becoming a national embarrassment for the Republican Party -- or she would be if Republicans were capable of shame. Media Matters has the latest:

Rep. Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post -- which is no longer available online -- in which she said that she was speculating “because there are too many coincidences to ignore” regarding the fire, including that then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wanted to build the high-speed rail project and “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.”

You can read the now-deleted post at the Media Matters link above. But will it trouble any Republican voters? I doubt it. I'm sure a large percentage of them think this is exactly the way the world works, and thus believe that Greene's theory seems quite plausible. The rest are just pleased that she hates Democrats, trains, and "globalist" financiers.

It's unlikely that the Republican Party will pressure Greene to resign, or even strip her of her committee assignments, which is what the party did to Steve King when his racism finally began to seem like too much of a liability -- at this point, rejecting her would probably offend the GOP voter base almost as much as rejecting Donald Trump would.

But isn't it possible that her fundraising will dry up? King's did in the run-up to the 2020 election cycle, in which he lost to a primary challenger. But as the Georgia Recorder's Daniel Newhauser tells us, Greene's money mostly comes from small-money donors and rich people who are just as crazy and angry as she is.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ... doesn’t have much in the way of corporate PAC money in her fundraising coffers to begin with, according to a Recorder analysis of her campaign records.

And unlike companies like AT&T, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and GE, some of Greene’s largest donors are cheering on her continued false claims that former President Donald Trump won the November election....

Take the Howalt family, owners of Dalton’s Textile Rubber & Chemical Co., a multinational and multi-million dollar company based in Greene’s district that manufactures compounds used to make backings for rugs, among other things....

When contacted via email, Frederick “Chip” Howalt, ... president of the company, said that not only will his family continue donating to Greene, they will refuse to donate to any candidate who doesn’t claim the election was stolen.

“We are not re-thinking our support of [Greene] one bit. If anything, we’ll find a legal way to increase it,” he said in an email. “The only financial support our Family will pull will be from ANY RINO’s [Republicans in name only] complicit in blocking investigations into Voter Fraud and Irregularities (GA had many) and not Objecting to confirm the Biden Electors where practical and advisable to do so.”

Bill Pope, the owner of Texas-based NCIC, a paid phone and messaging system for prisoners, said he won’t stop donating to Greene either in the wake of her actions following the Capitol attack.

“I’ll donate. That’s not stopping me. That was the media pushing one riot versus another,” he said. “I mean, she didn’t pull her support for Trump. I’m kind of mad at [U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, but hey.”

... the donor rolls of Greene’s campaign committee, leadership political action committee and affiliated super PAC read like a who’s who of conservative rabble rousers, unlikely to be cowed by bad press for supporting Greene. There’s L. Lin Wood, the one-time celebrity attorney to the accused Atlanta Olympics bomber who has made a personal cause of egging on conspiracy theories and challenging the election of President Joe Biden.

There’s Thomas Beckwith, the Florida businessman who successfully challenged the Obama-era contraceptive rules. Citizens United donated, as did the Gun Owners of America, a farther-right version of the NRA.

Don't stereotype the people who support candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene as toothless yokels. Some of them are CEOs. Mike Lindell isn't the only politcal ignoramus in a C-suite.

So she'll probably have the money to run as many campaigns as she wants. We'll be rid of her only if Democrats find a way to make her more trouble than she's worth to the GOP.

(Georgia Recorder story via Paul Canning.)