Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’ll demand vote on removing Mike Johnson as House speaker next week – live

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Greene then yielded to Thomas Massie, one of two fellow Republicans publicly supporting her effort.

The Kentucky lawmaker elaborated on why they will press on with their effort to remove Mike Johnson, despite Democratic leaders’ intervention to protect his job, and an apparent lack of enthusiasm among the GOP:

Now, you may say … congressman Massie, Hakeem Jeffries just told you, he’s gonna save Mike Johnson’s bacon. So why go through with it? It’s a futile exercise … Why would you go through with this? Look, we didn’t get elected to make excuses. We didn’t get elected to say we shouldn’t even try. We got elected to come here and give it our best and also to impose transparency. What we’ve seen here is the coming out of the uniparty, and it will be consolidated and it will be transparent and apparent next week to all Americans when this vote happens. Too many of our colleagues have thrown up their hands in frustration and apathy. ‘Oh, we shouldn’t even try. Let’s just coast this one out’. I tell you what, it’s too dangerous to coast this one out. We cannot coast this one out. Hakeem Jeffries knows if we coast this one out, we lose the majority.

Greene said she thought voting on the motion to remove Johnson, which at this point does not appear to have enough support to succeed, would help Republicans maintain their slim majority in the House after the November elections:

I’m gonna tell you, at over $34tn in debt, with millions and millions of people invading our country and an economy that I don’t even know how is staying afloat because every business owner I know has been suffering, and people fed up with the drama on television and fed up with the fighting and fed up with the bullshit from Washington DC, are ready for a Republican majority that’s ready to support President Trump and his agenda in January of 2025. And I’m happy to deliver that vote for everyone next week.

Greene says she'll demand vote on removing Johnson next week

After a lengthy denunciation of Mike Johnson, Majorie Taylor Greene said she will call for a vote on her motion to remove him as speaker of the House next week.

“Next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate, absolutely calling it,” Greene said.

She indicated she thought the vote would hurt vulnerable Democrats:

I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker, and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again, having supported our Republican speaker, a Christian conservative, I think that’ll play well. I’m excited about it.

And also be a pain for Republicans she disagrees with:

[I] also can’t wait to see my Republican conference show their cards and show who we are. Because voters deserve it. Is the Republican party … have they finally learned their lesson? Have they finally heard the message from voters back at home? Are they willing to actually fight? Are they going to just keep going along to get along? Because it’s really easy to do that in Washington DC.

Greene recounted how she went from supporting Mike Johnson as speaker to threatening to remove him from office.

She blamed Johnson for the passage of a March government funding bill that “fully funded Joe Biden’s agenda”:

So, I entered a motion to vacate but I didn’t call it for a vote. I was controlled. I was responsible. I was being conscious and caring about my conference in our majority. It was a warning to stop serving the Democrats. And support our Republican conference and support our agenda. And he didn’t do it.

She then railed against Johnson for allowing a vote on the foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan:

What’s when Mike Johnson fully joined the disgusting business model of Washington DC, to fund forever wars. Yeah, that’s what this is. The uniparty is make ‘Ukraine great again’. The uniparty is all about funding every single foreign war. They think this is the business model that needs to be done … Americans do not want to spend their hard-earned tax dollars to fund the murder and killing in foreign countries. They’re fed up with it, and they’re screaming it as loud as they possibly can.

A photo of the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries (left), with the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson (right), displayed this morning outside the US Capitol. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Marjorie Taylor Greene has begun her press conference outside the US Capitol, where she is expected to announce whether she will press on with her campaign to remove fellow Republican Mike Johnson as speaker of the House.

She started off by reminding everyone of her affinity for Donald Trump:

I was one of the Americans in 2016 that looked at a presidential stage of 17 Republican candidates, and the only one that stood out to me was Donald John Trump. The very man that stood out and represented Republican voters and Americans all over the country, that we’re sick and tired of a Republican establishment failing us over and over again. That’s why I supported him in 2016, that’s why I supported him in 2020, and that’s why I support him now.

To make her point that the speaker is insufficiently loyal, the Georgia lawmaker spoke before photos of Johnson with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader.

Far-right lawmakers accuse Johnson of belonging to 'uniparty'

In the below tweet, Thomas Massie, one of two other House representatives known to be backing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate, accuses speaker Mike Johnson of belonging to the “uniparty”:

Uniparty is a term that has become popular on the far right to describe Republicans working with Democrats – the allegation being that the two parties are essentially the same. Lawmakers like Massie would prefer that Johnson hold fast and reject compromises with Democrats, like the foreign aid bill that funded Ukraine’s defense, or the government funding legislation enacted in March that Greene seized on to begin her push to remove Johnson as speaker.

Of course, there would have been consequences to holding up those two bills that could have harmed the GOP overall. If the government funding bills did not pass, Washington would have shut down, while if Ukraine did not receive more support, Russia could have made further battlefield gains. That could blow back on Republicans, particularly lawmakers in vulnerable seats – a group that does not include Greene or Massie.

Massie goes on to accuse Johnson of receiving the endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader. Here’s more from him:

Marjorie Taylor Greene to announce next move after Democrats intervene to protect speaker Mike Johnson

Good morning, US politics blog readers. We’re kicking the day off with a press conference from far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who yesterday suffered a serious setback in her campaign to remove Mike Johnson as speaker of the House. The chamber’s top Democrats announced that they would oppose Greene’s effort, a reversal from just a few months ago, when the party was more than happy to lend its votes to the GOP insurgency that booted Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair. But even before Democrats moved to protect Johnson – a staunch conservative who has lately worked with the minority party to pass bills dealing with foreign aid, government spending and a controversial surveillance law – Greene only had two known co-signers of her motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, which isn’t much. She yesterday accused Johnson of making a “slimy back room deal” for Democratic support, and hinted she might put her motion up for a vote anyway. The speaker, meanwhile, has said little about the drama.

Greene’s press conference is scheduled for 9am ET outside the Capitol, and the Georgia lawmaker will be joined by Thomas Massie, one of her two colleagues supporting the effort. We’ll tell you what they have to say.

Here’s what else is going on:

• Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy – when many women do not yet realize they are yet pregnant – goes into effect today, and Kamala Harris is traveling to Jacksonville for a 2.45pm speech on the administration’s fight to protect reproductive rights.

• Protests against Israel continue at college campuses nationwide, with police clearing demonstrators from Columbia University last night, and clashes breaking out at the University of California, Los Angeles. Follow our live blog for more.

• Joe Biden announced his administration had canceled $6.1b in debt for students who attended the Arts Institutes, a for-profit college accused of fraud.