In her resignation statements, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor included in her reasons that she was unable to get things done for her district, particularly table legislation, and that having to defend an abusive Donald Trump and fight for her seat only to face the prospect of being in the minority after midterms was deeply unappetizing.
It appears other Republicans are thinking along the same lines. From Chuck L:
BREAKING: Trump gets nightmare Monday news as it's revealed that an "explosive" wave of House Republicans will soon resign like Marjorie Taylor Greene did — destroying Mike Johnson's Speakership.
This has MAGA world in an absolute panic…
"A few other GOP members messaged us… pic.twitter.com/1GW8ZDv9JO
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) November 24, 2025
This possibility seems serious enough to have generated a segment on Breaking Points:
While there is some truth to the argument by Saagar and Krystal that Congresscritters brought these woes on themselves, a few caveats are in order.
First, my impression is that in most countries, being what the UK calls a backbencher (there a Member of the House of Commons who is not a minister), as in an not-much-of-a-name, no special appointments legislator is indeed not an influential position. Most party members in most countries are expected to follow party discipline. For instance, it isn’t as much commented on as it should be that the reason Democrats caved on the shutdown was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to whip votes, as is normally done, and explicitly told members to vote their conscience.
In the US, parties exercise control through substantial centralization of funding and other resources. House members have barely any staff, and smallish budgets, so they can’t even buy much in the way of research. I am not sure of the Republican version of this syndrome but here is how it works on the Democrat side. From a 2011 post, Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine”:
Let’s first look at how crassly explicit the pricing is. Ferguson cites the work of Marian Currander on how it works for the Democrats in the House of Representatives:
Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million.
Ferguson teases out the implications:
Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it — you buy it, runs the challenge. They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down and the same amount later, through fundraising…..
The whole adds up to something far more sinister than the parts. Big interest groups (think finance or oil or utilities or health care) can control the membership of the committees that write the legislation that regulates them. Outside investors and interest groups also become decisive in resolving leadership struggles within the parties in Congress. You want your man or woman in the leadership? Just send money. Lots of it….
The Congressional party leadership controls the swelling coffers of the national campaign committees, and the huge fixed investments in polling, research, and media capabilities that these committees maintain — resources the leaders use to bribe, cajole, or threaten candidates to toe the party line… Candidates rely on the national campaign committees not only for money, but for message, consultants, and polling they need to be competitive but can rarely afford on their own..
This concentration of power also allows party leaders to shift tactics to serve their own ends….They push hot-button legislative issues that have no chance of passage, just to win plaudits and money from donor blocs and special-interest supporters. When they are in the minority, they obstruct legislation, playing to the gallery and hoping to make an impression in the media…
The system …ensures that national party campaigns rest heavily on slogan-filled, fabulously expensive lowest-common-denominator appeals to collections of affluent special interests. The Congress of our New Gilded Age is far from the best Congress money can buy; it may well be the worst. It is a coin-operated stalemate machine that is now so dysfunctional that it threatens the good name of representative democracy itself.
There’s even more damning material in this post. And even before Ferguson described these practices in the Washington Spectator, Jane Hamsher called out the Obama veal pen. From a 2010 post:
Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :
Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term “veal pen” means:
The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf’s permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves’ muscles, thus producing tender “gourmet” veal.
[]
About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this “food,” laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves’ experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..
I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.
And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….
Where are they on health care? Why aren’t they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?
Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?
Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.
The truth is — they’ve all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration’s ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.
So it is a bit surprising to see supposed DC insiders like the Breaking Points duo seem unaware of this dynamic, that any Representative or Senator that is interested in being re-elected, unless they are fabulously wealthy and can fund their own campaign (think Mike Bloomberg level rich) is hostage to the harsh discipline of money-dependence. The ginormous cost of running for office, thanks to the expense of TV ads, is the reason. Most countries either disallow political TV commercials or allow candidates a limited amount of free air time if they have met certain thresholds.
Second, it is a bit unfair in particular to depict Republican Congresscritters in abdicating their duties with respect to DOGE in particular. Trump was elected by a solid margin. Many Republicans campaigned on budget scaremongering or other flavors of fiscal rectitude. Democrats were notably missing in action in doing anything about DOGE save handwringing. And what were they to do? They could attempt to hold Trump legislation hostage…..which would be highly irregular for the party members of a new President. Perhaps they could encourage harmed voters to sue and file amicus brief supporting them.
Third, Trump’s spectacular vindictiveness is another reason that unhappy Republican legislators might hesitate to act. Recall that Trump called MTG a traitor. He has applied the same label to Democratic Congresscritters, all with either military or spook state credentials, who banded together to publish a commercial reminding servicemembers of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. Trump has launched FBI investigations. From Aljaazera:
The FBI has requested interviews with six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a social media video urging members of the United States military to “defy illegal orders”, according to the legislators.
The statements on Tuesday came a day after the Pentagon said it was reviewing Senator Mark Kelly, a US Navy veteran and one of the six lawmakers, over potential violations of military law…
President Donald Trump has previously accused the lawmakers of sedition and said in a social media post that the crime is “punishable by DEATH”.
All six of the Democratic lawmakers in the video have served in the military or the intelligence community.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of the six in the video, told reporters on Tuesday that “the counterterrorism division at the FBI sent a note to the members of Congress, saying they are opening what appears to be an inquiry against the six of us”.
Third, it is still important to point out the established pattern of Congress ceding power to the Executive Branch, as Saagar and Krystal have done. But this pattern goes back at least the Nixon imperial presidency. And it extends far beyond war powers. One of my pet beefs is the way Congress treats the economy as really not their problem and punts that largely to the Fed and the Administration. Admittedly, trying to legislate to response to big shifts in activity is hard. So how about more emphasis on policies that operate as economic stabilizers….which particularly favors social safety nets, as in spending drops in good times and rises in bad ones? Or even more boldly, a discussion of the need for a more concerted view of what growth oriented policies might be, starting with infrastructure spending?
Regardless, we can hope that Trump is hoist ahead of the midterm schedule on his petard of incompetence and bullying. Such schadenfreude!
While I’m not sure it work, in a weird sense Trump may be aided by the D’s gaining control of the House ahead of the midterms. This would give him a foil to scream about.
But, if the economy is still weak next summer it may not matter.
As to MTG, I have no sorrows for her. It is widely reported that she actively used her seat to make $$$$.
Came in worth a few hundred thousand, left worth over 20 million. Its a great gig if you can get it.
MTG is retiring right when she gets her full pension and benefits. The whole point of being generous with the benefits is so their don’t do insider trading and are well taken care of. But I guess integrity doesn’t matter anymore.
For comparison, AOCs net worth is in the hundreds of thosands.
I cannot wait to see MTGs next grift.
That is an incorrect statement. MTG came into office worth well over $5 million. She arrived as a multi-millionaire businesswoman with substantial holdings in her family’s construction company and other assets. While her net worth has grown during her congressional tenure, as is common among members of Congress, the narrative of entering with “only a few hundred thousand” is contradicted by her official financial disclosures showing millions in assets from the start.Her increase in net worth over her term of office is mainly tied to the increased value of her assets that she owned prior to being elected. That being said, her stellar performance in stock trading, including in particular her trades on Palantir, have brought scrutiny. There has been no indication that she did anything illegal. Almost all congressman see an increase in wealth while in office. I personally don’t agree with MTG on some of her issues, but I believe she is one of the more authentic members of Congress. It’s a fact her constituents love her.
Quiver Quantitative does excellent free tracking of Congressional net worth and investment income. Started by twin brother math nerds from America’s Dairyland.
https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Marjorie%20Taylor%20Greene-G000596/net-worth
Most of her growth in wealth comes from her stake in the family’s construction company.
How much business Taylor Commercial got because of her position is another matter.
Exactly. That is a different issue. Her company, Taylor Commercial in which she owns a 51% stake, specializes in affordable housing projects utilizing Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) programs. I would be surprised if her being a Congress critter didn’t help with some of those government funding programs. That being said, if there had been anything improper, given the level of scrutiny she has been subjected to, I am sure it would have surfaced.
As a teen I worked for a very prominent home builder in the Midwest. I cleaned out construction debris from new homes, flushed all the toilets (it’s a thing), hauled trash away, mowed empty lots (horrible job, killing all of that flora), but the task that made me finally quit was cleaning the mansion of the very rich owners. 20+ full bedroom suites, all kitted out with the best of the best in furniture and materials. I also had to help the lady in her huge yard with pond and tractors.
What kind of homes did they build? Low-Income Housing Tax Credit homes, all pretty shoddy. There were photos on the wall with the owners and Reagan and Ford and others.
With respect to “full pension and benefits”, from what I can tell from her entry date and 5 yr tenure, pension starts at age 62 $14,790/yr and I don’t see that she gets anything from FEHB plans. Did earn 20 quarters of social security + medicare. Plus whatever she might have put into TSP (I guess they get some match for that but didn’t research it).
MTG was already well-off when she arrived in Congress to try and help the poor realise the American Dream. Her religous beliefs are strong, and she maintains her political and personal principles in an arena in which it is difficult to do so. Personally, as a Corbynite Scottish-Lancastrian with American kin who are wellheeled, MAGA, lean to the left and keep me clued in on their local politics, I disagree with her on many things and I agree with her on many more things and, unlike so many of her colleagues, she has obviously grown in office, and is still growing, and should be a considerable part of America’s future, so I am obviously saddened by the fact that she is resigning from Congress before her term is out.
I hope that she does use her time out to rethink her position and decides to run for a higher position in which she can carry a greater degree of influence that she does in an utterly disfunctional Congress which has completely failed the Founding Fathers.
Our Congress is a Blasphemy.
Thanks for this post. Saagar and Krystall might be too young to remember when both parties in Congress switched from assigning committee chair and ranking member assignments and other important positions from the seniority system to a pay-to-play system back in the mid-1980’s to mid-1990’s years, the Gingerich and Clinton years.
Ferguson brings out this point very well.
That explains a lot of what’s wrong in Congress today, imo. Seniority was based on voters approving their Congress rep enough to re-elect them many, many times. That gave voters some actual effect on Congress’s actions.
Pay-to-play is just that. A certain seat now requires a certain amount of fund raising. Pay-to-play. From Roll Call:
Gavels for top House committees don’t always come cheap
Leaders of top panels transferred big money to party campaign arms
https://rollcall.com/2023/02/09/gavels-for-top-house-committees-dont-always-come-cheap/
The old seniority system is eliminated, along with voters’ interests, imo.
The old seniority system was definitely a mixed bag. On the one hand it enabled the Jim Crow regime to persist in the Democratic Party’s Solid South well into the second half of the 20th century. When federal House or Senate seat opened up in that region the “inner party” of the state organization selected a promising young man (and in that era they were almost always men) as their candidate on the expectation that he would remain in office for 30 or 40 years while rising through increasingly powerful leadership positions. Some of these men achieved greatness in spite of having to tacitly support the continuation of that region’s racial policies. Examples are J William Fulbright of Arkansas, who was a longtime chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Texarkana’s Wright Patman who gained fame as the chair of the House Banking Committee who did much to restrain the financial sector’s predatory instincts. As Matt Stoller wrote in Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power And Democracy, Patman was unseated from the committee chair following the deluge of New Democratic “Watergate Baby” Congress members elected in the 1974. The 94th Congress marked the end of the seniority system, and the beginning of the capture of the Democratic Party by their financial sector.
Yes. The Watergate Babies didn’t want to wait for the seniority system and voters to land them a plum committee seat.
And buying a seat didn’t conflict with the Dem 3rd way neoliberal ideology.
Our Strom Thurmond was one of those seniority politicians who fought for Jim Crow but later moderated his position in line with the New South position that said that defiance on Civil Rights was hurting Southern business. People like Thurmond also steered lots of Federal largesse such as dam projects and military installations at a time when the downtrodden South had little else other than exploitative textile plants.
So he was representing the interests of his white constituents and later perhaps all of them. But it has turned out that the military Keynesianism is in many ways as bad for the country as the Jim Crow. The social side of the government has been swallowed by the Pentagon and that’s only accelerating.
Slick Willy and my onetime congressman Gingrich–what a pair!
But since nothing is new under the sun Congressional corruption is hardly a new thing. There have been movies about it (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and long ago history lessons about Tammany and the city machines. Trump’s favorite the Gilded Age was particularly ripe.
The recent Ken Burns show didn’t shy from the reality that the Founders themselves had financial interests while also acting in an Enlightenment context. Like FDR they wanted to make it all work better and not tear the house down.
And that’s probably the best we can hope for. Trump and his Tech bros are not serious people and here’s suggesting the United States of What Works will survive them.
Thanks for shedding light on a dirty corner of Congress. I wonder if some of these dues they’re required to pay are coming out of their own pockets. As opposed to fund-raising. That might help explain why there is so much insider trading going on. Explain, but not justify it.
The whole system needs to be burned to the ground.
Adding to the comment I left above:
In the seniority system the politicians had to be mindful of what their voters wanted year after year after year. Now they have to be mindful of what the big donors want year after year after year.
Thank you for this post. The link in
goes to a login: can this be fixed?
Sorry, fixed! Copy and paste is a lot less reliable in the latest Mac OS. It seems not to displace the last item on the clipboard.
That’s the Apple AI helping you!
RE: Most countries either disallow political TV commercials or allow candidates a limited amount of free air time if they have met certain thresholds.
Company I worked for used to own some TV stations and ad revenue would spike enormously every presidential year. The CFO would joke that if any pollsters contacted us about who we’re voting for, we should tell them we were undecided and could only make up our minds by even more TV spots. Just in case anybody was wondering why we roll this way in the US – it’s always about the money.
There is no cure for the corruption. Anthony Kennedy’s Citizens United decision opened the spigot to the maximum, but it was always there. To me what has changed is the open shamelessness of the grifting. The neutering of congress critters. The blatant disregard for the declared wishes of the people, i.e. universal health care, an end to the stupid wars, I would add casting all the neocons into outer darkness, but who cares what I think. The Gilded age was bad enough. This is much much worse and there is neither cure nor palliative in sight.
Yeah, that’s what I see too. Dysfunctional is no longer is adequate. Congress is completely enshitified.
I know one of the current IDpol tropes is to hold up Boomers as the generation that caused this mess. I cannot blame a complete generation – I personally know too many that are not well off at all, but that generation of elite politicians that got into office in the 1990’s like Pelosi or McConnell or even before like Biden or many others (every President since then), and are still (even if retired) in office or in the back rooms making decisions. They really made their mark.
What a legacy they wrought! Literally handed an America they did not create that was without doubt the world’s leading nation and arguably a world empire, and just completely [family blogged] it all into the ground in (looking at the world history of empires) almost record time. THAT is an accomplishment, and their legacy. All of those people should be voted out ASAP, they’ve done so much damage.
So seeing younger generations give up and leave is not good, but I suspect MTG will be back.
P.G. Wodehouse is rightly remembered as a novelist who was somewhat naive about politics, but he gives a very trenchant account of the humble nature of the back-bencher in his novel _Much Obliged, Jeeves_ (1971). In the novel, Bertie is canvassing for his old friend Ginger Winship, who is standing for election as M.P. for Market Snodsbury.
‘You want taxes cut, don’t you?’
‘I do.’
‘And our foreign policy bumped up?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And our exports doubled and a stick of dynamite put under the pound? I’ll bet you do. Then vote for Ginger Winship, the man who with his hand on the helm of the ship of state will steer England to prosperity and happiness, bringing back once more the spacious days of Good Queen Bess.’ This was a line of talk that Jeeves had roughed out for my use. There was also some rather good stuff about this sceptred isle and this other Eden, demi-something, but I had forgotten it. ‘You can’t say that wouldn’t be nice,’ I said.
A moment before, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that she could look more like Aunt Agatha than she had been doing, but now she achieved this breathtaking feat. She sniffed, if not snorted, and spoke as follows.
‘Young man, don’t be idiotic. Hand on the helm of the ship of state, indeed! If Mr. Winship performs the miracle of winning this election, which he won’t, he will be an ordinary, humble back-bencher, doing nothing more notable than saying “Hear, hear” when his superiors are speaking and “Oh” and “Question” when the opposition have the floor.’