TUNNEL HILL, Ga. — Less than two weeks before Election Day, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, made her case against Democrats — and why she’ll work to impeach President Joe Biden if projections hold and Republicans take the majority in both houses of Congress.
Greene spoke to a crowd of about 150 in Tunnel Hill, asking voters to send her back to Washington, D.C., to represent Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. In the Nov. 8 general election, she faces Democrat Marcus Flowers in her bid to defend her freshman term.
(READ MORE: Greene, Flowers spar over who best reflects 14th District voters)
“Honestly, what they (Democrats) have done to our country is unforgivable,” Greene said Wednesday evening. “And it’s policy. Many of these people have been there for decades and decades, and look at the mess we’re in.”
Looking past her challenger, Greene criticized the Biden administration for what she called a “wide open” southern border, a “disastrous” withdrawal from Afghanistan, a fentanyl crisis, high gas prices, inflation and gender-affirming surgery for on children. For these reasons, she said she wants to impeach Biden.
An audience member asked about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s reported opinion about impeaching Biden. Greene said McCarthy said he will not pursue impeachment for just political reasons — and asked the crowd to read between the lines.
In more recent interviews, McCarthy said he wanted to start with investigations before any decision on impeachments.
With Biden’s term as president lasting another two years, Greene said Republicans can’t pass any sweeping legislation — but she said they do have control over budgets and committees.
Control of the budget will allow Republicans to do things like defund vaccine mandates in the military and defund the expansion of the Internal Revenue Service. Government shutdowns aren’t a problem, Greene said.
“It doesn’t shut the country down, it just shuts down the people (the government) that are screwing it up,” Greene said.
Lack of attention to the nation’s southern border, Greene said, has allowed an increase of both human trafficking and drug smuggling. In his rallies, Greene said, former President Donald Trump has been promoting giving the death penalty to drug dealers, which Greene said she supports.
Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan “humiliated” the nation’s military and left hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment behind for our enemies, Greene said.
“I’m against foreign wars and wanted to see us pull out of Afghanistan — but not like that,” she said, adding that she thinks Trump would have done a better job withdrawing troops from the two-decades-long conflict.
Greene said she has filed legislation that would make it a felony to outlaw gender-affirming surgery, what she calls genital mutilation. Fifty Republican co-sponsors have signed on to the bill, named the Protect Children’s Innocence Act.
Criticizing climate change legislation and investments, Greene mocked Democrats by saying they want Americans to pay taxes to control the weather. Renewable energy like solar and wind isn’t as reliable as fossil fuels, she said, and the climate has always been changing and will continue to change.
“It changes four times a year,” a man in the audience said, bringing a laugh from the crowd.
In a phone interview, Flowers talked about his motivation to run against Greene in a Republican-majority district after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who believed the election had been stolen from him — even though the states, the courts, the Electoral College, his own administration and eventually Congress determined that was not the case.
“I got into the race because of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s part in Jan. 6, driving those people to the Capitol by pushing the big lie almost immediately after the election,” Flowers said.
After traveling all over the district, sitting down with community leaders and knocking on the doors of 100,000 voters, Flowers said Greene isn’t focused on important needs like infrastructure, housing, schools or veterans.
“She’s not addressing any of these issues,” Flowers said. “And I see her as a threat to democracy itself. Her values are not shared by many people in this district.”
(READ MORE: Ballot challenge for Marjorie Taylor Greene started in Walker County, Georgia)
Rather than addressing these critical issues, Greene is focused on issues that don’t directly affect the lives of residents of the district, Flowers said.
Most of his time until Election Day will be focused on getting out the vote, but Flowers said he’s doing a public event from 3-5 p.m. on Halloween in downtown Rome, Georgia. He said he’ll meet with the owners of businesses on Broad Street at his campaign office at 240 Broad Street.
In her speech, Greene talked about Jan. 6, her third day on the job as a house representative. She said members of Congress were objecting to Arizona’s election results when they heard noises outside the House chamber and were told the Capitol had been breached.
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The Jan. 6 riot interrupted Greene and other Republicans’ legal right to object to the 2020 election, she said, and afterward, many of the Republican objectors gave up their claim. As a result, the only people who benefited from the riots were Democrats, she said.
Attendee Don Walker shared a story with the crowd about his former tennis partner. The partner was liberal, while Walker, from Ringgold, is conservative. He said they used to laugh about politics and maintained their friendship and sports partnership despite their differences.
Now, Walker said Democratic leaders use divisions to pit people against each other.
“And they have that emotion that really keeps them from listening to what somebody else says or discussing it,” Walker said. “When the discussion stops and arguing starts, you’ve gone past the point of solving things or compromising.”
Walker said the people he knows are a microcosm of voters across the political spectrum, and the main issue motivating people to re-think their “political church” is the increased price of groceries.
Contact Andrew Wilkins at awilkins@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6659. Follow him on Twitter @tweetatwilkins.