Marjorie Taylor Greene is now in the mainstream of the Republican party

Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was ousted from the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right hive in Congress. Yes, it’s true. Greene is insufficiently reactionary, according to her peers.

The fact that Greene, who by any reasonable standard would be classified as an extremist, isn’t extreme enough to belong to the House Freedom Caucus says a lot about the state of today’s GOP. As a reminder, Greene has made transphobia and homophobia her brand. She has called President Joe Biden a pedophile, described D.C. Pride as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and called student-athletes “trans terrorists.”

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She came to Congress in 2021 with a history of support for conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric. She lost her committee assignment in her first term for her past comments, including liking social media posts that called for shooting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and hanging former President Barack Obama. She aggressively confronted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), accusing her of supporting terrorists, one of several confrontations with members of Congress.

Yet somehow Greene is no longer right-wing enough for the other 45 members of the House Freedom Caucus. What happened?

The ostensible reason is the feud between Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). For a while, Greene and Boebert were the kind of yin and yang of the far right in the House – one dark hair, the other blonde; one from the South, the other from the West. But for months the two have been engaged in the kind of feud that would do Bette Davis and Joan Crawford proud.

Fittingly, the breaking point came over who could impeach Biden first. Both Greene and Boebert had competing articles of impeachment but Boebert forced a vote on hers ahead of Greene’s.

An infuriated Greene called Boebert a “little b***h” on the House floor.

“I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little b***h to me,” Greene said, according to a witness. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.”

Boebert then reportedly replied, “Ok, Marjorie, we’re through,” to which Greene responded, “We were never together.”

It was this exchange that supposedly led the House Freedom Caucus to decide to show Greene the door. “I think the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) told Politico.

Etiquette hardly seems to be the standard by which the House Freedom Caucus measures its own behavior. After all, Boebert herself once suggested that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was a suicide bomber.

The real problem seems to be that Greene has gotten too chummy with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the nemesis of the House Freedom Caucus. Greene allied herself with McCarthy during his humiliating quest for the speakership, and in return, McCarthy granted Greene an unseemly amount of power.

As a result, Greene went from being considered a member of the fringe to being absorbed into the party mainstream.

It’s not as if Greene has tempered any of her views. She’s as anti-LGBTQ as ever, in the most offensive, vicious way possible. She’s declared that Twitter-alternative Threads is just a “Marxist style social media experience” that will be used to “steal elections.” And she’s still singing the praises of Donald Trump in an effort to win a spot as his vice presidential nominee.

But if you want to see how mainstream Greene has become – or more correctly, how much the GOP has moved toward Greene – you need look no further than her collaboration with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Stefanik, once considered the future of the GOP establishment, has since gone full MAGA after reading which direction the wind is blowing.

Now Stefanik and Greene have teamed up to expunge Trump’s impeachments. They want to pass a resolution that would magically erase any attempt to hold Trump accountable for his actions in office, even if those attempts failed.

That Stefanik and Greene would be allies in this effort tells you everything you need to know about the current state of the GOP. Nothing is too extreme. Everyone is committed to the same cause, which is elevating Trump’s vision (and by extension Trump himself). The only fights are personal fights, not fights about policy.

When Greene entered Congress two years ago, she seemed like a sideshow. As it turns out, she’s now center stage, and the rest of the party has joined her.