Current News

/

ArcaMax

Democratic lawmaker takes the bait on Marjorie Taylor Greene 'troll' amendment

Justin Papp, CQ-Roll Call on

Published in News & Features

WASHINGTON — When Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene used a typically under-the-radar legislative process to send political messages Wednesday about foreign aid funding bills, one of her Democratic colleagues decided to strike back.

Greene filed a flurry of amendments to the Ukraine aid bill with the House Rules Committee, including one to require any member who votes in favor of the package “to conscript in the Ukrainian military.”

Several congressional experts dubbed it a “troll” amendment, slang for something outrageous meant to provoke a response.

Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a frequent Greene foil, took the bait.

He offered his own amendments. One would appoint Greene “as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another would rename her Cannon office the “Neville Chamberlain Room,” a reference to the former prime minister of the United Kingdom known for his appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

“I’m not going to sit by and let her nonsense go unanswered. If she wants to do Putin’s bidding then let’s just go make it official,” Moskowitz said in an interview. “She wants to surrender the world. Let the Ayatollah in Iran take Israel. Let Putin take Europe. That’s what she wants.”

 

Greene did not respond to a request for comment on Moskowitz’s amendments.

Lawmakers customarily file messaging bills, meant to score political points, even though they won’t go anywhere. But Greene and Moskowitz using the amendment process for such squabbling is something different, according to some congressional experts.

Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown, wrote on social media that there has “always been chucklehead Members of the House.”

“But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me,” Glassman posted.

...continued

swipe to next page

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus