Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday attempted to call for a motion to adjourn the House, a tactic the firebrand conservative has used in the past to delay votes, but this time House rules derailed her effort.
Mrs. Greene’s motion never got off the ground because she offered it before the House officially began the legislative day, which requires the offering of a prayer and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I don’t even get it myself. It’s like we haven’t said the prayer or the pledge, therefore you can’t make a motion to adjourn, according to the Parliamentarian,” Mrs. Greene, Georgia Republican, fumed to The Washington Times. “This place just doesn’t work like the real world, unfortunately, which is why we have so much debt. … Who likes having this much national debt? if we ran a company like this, none of us would be in business, we would all be bankrupt.”
The House on Monday took up the first of two big spending bills, a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate. The House later this week is expected to take up Mr. Biden’s $3.5 trillion social welfare bill.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Greene’s attempted maneuver caused the House to cancel debate of several pieces of legislation, including the infrastructure bill, when it was evident that she planned to return to the floor later and attempt another motion to adjourn, after the prayer and pledge.
Before she could be recognized at that time, the House went back into recess and Mrs. Greene returned to the GOP cloakroom.
At that point, she told a floor staffer, “I don’t have any committees. I have all day.”
Mrs. Greene returned in the early evening and called for a motion to adjourn before the House could begin debate on the infrastructure bill, forcing Democratic members to come to the floor to kill the motion in a roll call vote.
She timed the motion to coincide with a Democratic Caucus meeting, which was then interrupted when members had to go to the roll call vote. Democrats convened the caucus meeting to discuss how to advance the spending bills this week.
The House voted earlier this year to strip her of her committee assignments in response to what her critics called incendiary rhetoric.
Mrs. Greene’s procedural jab at the debate extends her feud with Democrats.
She began obstructing legislative business on the floor by calling for repeated motions to adjourn, which caused members to race to the House floor and perform roll call votes. The legislative delay tactic angered Democrats and some members of her party.
“This is too much. So simply, I would like to make a motion to adjourn, and I think it’s silly that I can’t do so as an elected member of Congress representing the 14th District of Georgia simply because we haven’t done the pledge or the prayer,” Mrs. Greene said during her remarks on the floor. “As you can see rules in Congress, just don’t work, because the rules here in Congress are allowing everything to continue to go downhill and hurt people that pay taxes.”
Democrats are currently in a race against time to pass both spending measures this week as well as pass a stopgap spending measure by Thursday to avoid a government shutdown.
Should Mrs. Greene or any other lawmaker return to the floor during legislative business and call for a motion to adjourn, that can cause further delays and problems for Democratic lawmakers looking to negotiate a spending measure that can pass the Senate.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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