The newly installed chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) is already backing down from his pledge to spend “every day” of 2024 to elect presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump as president again to instead spend most of Tuesday trying to save the embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson from justice, a report from Politico Playbook on Wednesday shows.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), an actual conservative and actual Republican, has been making moves against Johnson for his various betrayals in recent weeks including passing a bloated government funding plan that gave Democrats everything they wanted, casting the deciding vote for continuing warrantless surveillance of American citizens in the renewal of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and finally in passing a giant foreign aid package that among other things sends billions more in American tax dollars to the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Greene is moving forward with calling a privileged vote on her previously introduced motion to vacate against Johnson, she is expected to announce on Wednesday morning at a press conference.
Her move comes after, in exchange for his repeated betrayals of Republicans, Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced on Tuesday that Democrats would vote for the motion to table Greene’s motion to vacate—effectively saving Johnson from ouster. The Democrats’ unprecedented move is a bald power grab by the minority party in the sharply-divided chamber, and effectively seals their control over what happens on the floor of the House for the rest of Johnson’s tenure however short or long that may be as Speaker of the House.
What’s particularly interesting about all of this however is that Whatley has somehow managed to worm his way into the discussion, and on the Democrat side of Jeffries and Johnson rather than on the side of Republicans no less.
“Michael Whatley, the newly installed RNC co-chair, had already briefed Greene’s fellow House Republicans on the importance of party unity that morning, but Greene didn’t show. He delivered his pointed message to her personally: Don’t move against Johnson,” Politico Playbook reported on Wednesday morning.
Then Playbook includes a source familiar with the conversation that Whatley had with Greene. “He said, one, this is not helpful, and two, we want to expand and grow the majority in the House,” the “person familiar with Whatley’s message to Greene” said according to the report. “He was clear that any disruption to the conference on these efforts — including filing this [motion to vacate], does not help the case for party unity.”
Whatley himself went on the record later in the news item in the newsletter to call for “party unity.” Whatley’s quote reads: “nothing is more important than party unity and ensuring that we are focused on beating Joe Biden and Democrats in November.”
Usually, RNC chairs stay out of the intra-party affairs of Congress and focus solely on defeating Democrats, so Whatley’s decision to take this extraordinary step of helping a deeply unpopular Johnson is interesting in that regard for sure. But what’s particularly disturbing about Whatley’s actions here is that this effort he’s leading to do the bidding of Democrats like Jeffries appears to be a violation of the pledges Whatley made when he was first elected as the RNC chairman.
In fact, in his first interview as RNC chairman less than two months ago—which was with Breitbart News—Whatley explicitly stated he understood his role to be to elect Trump and to elect Republicans over Democrats.
“This year, the next eight months, are all about making sure that we win in November,” Whatley told Breitbart News back in early March. “Everything we do is going to be focused on winning. We are going to have to get out the vote and we are going to have to protect the ballot. Every dollar we raise and we spend at the RNC is going to be focused on those two missions. We are going to work very, very closely with the president’s campaign, and we’re going to make sure that we are a seamless operation. At the end of the day, the RNC was built 146 years ago with one purpose, which was to elect Republican presidents. We also know we’ve got Senate races and House races that are really truly important for us, so we are going to work up and down the country to win up and down the ballot. But the way we’re going to do that is getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.”
He added later in the interview that “we are going to work all day every day to make sure we are going to win in November.”
Well, spending an entire day doing the bidding of the Democrats on Capitol Hill is not working to win in November, plain and simple. Where are the ballot chasing operations the right so desperately needs? Where are the election integrity actions that Whatley promised? What is he doing about fundraising operations? Whatley and Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the RNC, had said in that original Breitbart News interview that their selection as the new leaders of the party represented a “new dawn” at the RNC, which grassroots donors had totally choked off under the previous leadership. But has anything really changed? When Whatley is spending any energy at all trying to steer GOP affairs on Capitol Hill towards the outcome Democrats very clearly would like to see happen, what’s the difference between the two parties and why should grassroots donors give to the party at all?
RNC spokeswoman Rachel Lee has not replied on Wednesday morning to in-depth questions from Breitbart News about this matter including why Whatley is interfering in House GOP affairs and why Whatley is standing with the Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Others in Whatley’s orbit tried to have off record conversations about this matter, but nobody denied what Whatley did what he did on Johnson’s behalf on Tuesday.