Can Anyone Unseat Marjorie Taylor Greene?

In February, Strahan held a fund-raiser at the Coosa Country Club, which Greene had recently joined. Many of its members are Republicans of the John Cowan variety (Cowan also belongs to the club), and Coosa bypassed its membership committee in order to admit Greene. At the Strahan event, gazpacho was served—a winking allusion to Greene’s recent remark about “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police.” Among the hundred or so attendees was a previously Cowan-supporting Republican voter named Mickey Tuck, who told me that he knew Greene supporters who’d changed their minds about her, but none who’d talk publicly about it. “She has this district so divided, and some of her hard-line supporters are just as crazy, mean, and vindictive as she is,” Tuck said. “Most of the ones who won’t be voting for her this time feel it’s better to just be quiet.” He was impressed by Strahan, but acknowledged that she’s a long shot. Strahan’s campaign declined to offer specific fund-raising numbers, noting only a “six-figure” total raised so far. Greene has raised more than seven million dollars.

Greene’s representative did not respond to an interview request. But, at the end of a February meet and greet that Strahan held in Polk County, an aide to Greene, Justin S. Kelley, stood up and offered a comment in Greene’s defense. “Marjorie is, quite frankly, one of the strongest and most effective members in Congress right now,” he said. He went on, “Her effectiveness is—or specifically for this district—does not come in what she’s done for the district right now. Her effectiveness comes in what she’s preventing from happening in this district right now.” Strahan’s campaign agreed with Kelley, insofar as he seemed to be conceding that Greene has done nothing for the district.

Greene is now facing another challenge, this one legal rather than electoral. On Thursday morning, a group of lawyers led by Ron Fein, the legal director of a nonprofit called Free Speech For People, is filing a lawsuit that, were it to be successful, would prevent Greene from running for office again. The suit argues that Greene’s statements and activities related to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th make the congresswoman an insurrectionist. A clause of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically prohibits those who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding public office. The suit, citing this clause, contends that Greene “is constitutionally disqualified from congressional office and, as such, ineligible to run as a candidate under state and federal law.”

Free Speech For People filed a similar lawsuit against the North Carolina congressman Cawthorn, in January, alleging that Cawthorn “was involved in efforts to intimidate Congress and the Vice President into rejecting valid electoral votes.” Cawthorn countersued to prevent the North Carolina State Board of Elections from taking up the suit, claiming that the provision was only meant to apply to former supporters of the Confederacy. The state’s attorney general disagreed, noting, in late February, that the provision had been applied, in 1919, to Victor Berger, who was found to have violated the Espionage Act. In early March, a Trump-appointed U.S. district judge blocked the challenge, invoking a law that forgave soldiers of the Confederacy, but, ten days later, a Fourth Circuit Court panel sent it back to that judge for expedited reconsideration.

The nonprofit’s new lawsuit cites numerous instances in which Greene, on social media or in person, has “advocated for political violence, up to and including, her encouragement of the insurrectionists on January 6.” Among the examples is a tweet that Greene sent out on January 5, 2021, calling the next day “our 1776 moment!” (Fein said that the year 1776, with its invocation of the American colonists’ rebellion against British authority, has become “a code word for violence.”) The lawsuit also points to a video on Facebook in which Greene says, “You can’t allow it to just transfer power peacefully like Joe Biden wants and allow him to become our President because he didn’t win this election.” Taken together, the suit insists, “Greene’s actions and the events of January 6 provide, at a minimum, a prima facie case” for disqualification.

Georgia’s secretary of state, the Republican Brad Raffensperger, is required to put any challenge to a candidate’s eligibility before an administrative-law judge, who will then consider the lawsuit’s claims. (Greene has been a vocal critic of Raffensperger, who refused Trump’s request, days before the insurrection, that Raffensperger “find” votes to tip Georgia in Trump’s favor.) “There are many possibilities along the way for different actors to evaluate it in different ways,” Fein told me, of the suit. He said that he expects Greene to appeal the case all the way to Georgia’s Supreme Court, and he was not inclined to guess how its judges would rule should it reach them. “But just looking at the facts and law,” he said, “it’s a strong case.”