Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t get out of her own way

Earlier this month, the House Freedom Caucus voted to boot Marjorie Taylor Greene from their ranks. Conventional wisdom seemed to be that Ms Greene, who has cozied up to House Republican leadership in recent months, had lost her edge.

In truth, her closeness with House GOP leadership was always transactional; Ms Greene saw supporting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a means to eventually subpoena figures in President Joe Biden’s orbit and hopefully have a vote to impeach the president as a means of revenge against Democrats for impeaching Donald Trump twice.

Usually, when former bomb-throwers, particularly conservatives, decide they want to do more than just raise hell, they become more tactful, choose their words and actions in a way that makes their actions more palatable to the larger population in hopes that they can bring along the rest of the country.

But on Wednesday, Ms Greene showed she will do no such thing and instead, will not work to persuade the rest of the country but rather keep playing into the right-wing fever dreams.

During a hearing of the House Oversight & Accountability Committee, Ms Greene displayed images of Hunter Biden engaging in sexual acts. Ms Greene ostensibly did so to demonstrate that the younger Mr Biden recorded tapes with a sex worker and that he paid the woman with money out of his law firm’s bank and to see if Hunter Biden violated federal law by taking a woman across state lines for sex.

There is no rational explanation for doing so. Ms Greene could have easily just shown a photo of the woman and Hunter Biden in plain clothes to prove her point. But she did so to turn the hearing into a spectacle that ultimately diverted from any potential attempt to hold Hunter Biden and his father in the White House accountable.

Moreover, Republicans cannot create distance between themselves and Ms Greene. She has been Mr McCarthy’s most steadfast defender on the right, helping him secure the speaker’s gavel and protecting him from snipes on the right amid the debt limit fight.

That means that despite the outrageous behaviour, do not expect Mr McCarthy to punish Ms Greene; she’s simply too important of an alibi for him among conservatives for him to simply abandon her even as she does something as reprehensible as showing pornographic images in a congressional hearing.

In the same respect, she continues to traverse the country to campaign with Mr Trump, who, for all intents and purposes, remains the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

Indeed, she has refined Mr Trump’s artful working of the press to make sure that she remains the center of attention. Indeed, come a week from now, few people will remember the subject of the hearing, but plenty of people will remember that Ms Greene displayed a picture of a naked Hunter Biden fornicating.

Of course, Ms Greene also faces little to no risk of losing her seat in Congress. She represents a solidly Republican slice of Georgia and if anything, her voters probably loved this stunt.

Rather, her actions put Republicans in swing districts at risk. Even if some independent and suburban voters have some reservations about Hunter Biden’s ethics (and polling does show that half of Americans think he’s received favorable treatment), they might find Ms Greene all the more unappetizing and might be compelled to vote out Republicans just to not give Ms Greene so much influence in Congress.

For their part, the president’s team seems to know how much of a drag on Republicans Ms Greene can be. On Tuesday, the Biden campaign released a video of her listing the president’s policy achievements in a way that was meant to be negative but they spun into a positive light.

This is part of Mr Biden’s larger push selling “Bidenomics” and Ms Greene’s latest actions allow him to offer a choice between a focus on the economy or lewd photos in the People’s House.