The First 21 Days of 2021: Hop on the Impeachment Trend with Marjorie Taylor Greene

Image courtesy of The Independent

By Eva Lynch

A historic double impeachment during the single-term Trump administration now seems to have set the precedent for articles of impeachment as the new preferred political weapon. Finally, one trend that wasn’t born on TikTok. 

Twitter’s blacklisting of GOP politicians has obsoleted entertaining political back-and-forth on its platform for those who aren’t Texas Rep. Ted Cruz and actor Seth Rogan, marking yet another groundbreaking change brought on by a new presidential organization. No longer will the airing of grievances be scrollable; why not hop on the same train that spurred so much discourse in 2017, upon Trump’s own inauguration? 

This alternative has already seen action through Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s #ImpeachBiden movement. In a January 13 tweet, Taylor Greene announced her intention to bring articles of impeachment against President Biden for abuse of power and followed through on Biden’s first full day in office. 

While she’s only entering her first term as a House Representative, Taylor Greene boasts notoriety across the country for a number of reasons, including her campaign ads that seemed to advocate for AR-15s’ place in the House instead of Taylor Greene herself. This humility and other publicized political views have garnered several epithets including “radical extremist” by her critics, “future Republican star” by President Donald Trump, and “adherent of QAnon” by Taylor Greene herself, though she has distanced herself from the Facebook page that solidified her adherence in 2018. Her recent mentions in mainstream media have focused on her part in Trump’s “cult-like legacy,” postulations in self-recorded Twitter videos that school shootings (including in Parkland, Fla.) were staged and that 2018 California wildfires were caused by laser beams from generators in space, and her accelerated push for a concurrent impeachment trial against Biden. 

Taylor Greene released a statement on Twitter following her filing of the articles of impeachment against Biden detailing her exhaustive list of grievances against the former vice president, including that he “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits — including financial compensation — from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”

Her rationale follows in the same vein of Biden’s opposers’—a vein swelling with accusations about Hunter Biden, who has long been Republicans’ beacon of hope in the form of a torpedo that will sink the Biden ship—but the parallels to popular Republican dissent to his presidency wasn’t enough to garner real support from her GOP colleagues. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California discussed Taylor Greene’s actions in a recent interview, saying that while she has a right as a member of Congress to file such articles, the timing and motivation of this case makes it premature.

“I called her. I disagree with that. That’s exactly what the Democrats did with President Trump, and why we disagreed when they wanted to come after him for purely political reasons,” McCarthy said. “I think Republicans are better than that. That this is one of the arguments we used against the Democrats, and I don’t think we should use it either.”

The Biden administration has made it clear through silence that Taylor Greene’s actions will not derail Biden’s intentions with his first 100 days in office. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if the administration had a response to a list of Taylor Greene’s recent comments and actions, including her harassment of Stoneman Douglas shooting survivor David Hogg and the label she bestowed upon him in a hashtag: “#littleHitler.”

“We don’t,” Psaki said curtly. “And I’m not going to speak further about her, I think, in this briefing room.”

The detail and length of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s list of Biden’s offenses reveal the detail and time with which she crafted it and, more importantly, the hottest new political weapon on the market: impeachment. If a president can be impeached, while his predecessor is undergoing a similar trial, before he even takes office, the United States arguably has greater concerns than fire-starting lasers from outer space.