Marjorie Greene’s Legislation In Congress Loses Vote Badly

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A legislative proposal from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) considered by the House on Thursday failed — dramatically, with only 14 votes in favor and 418 against it.

The measure would have broadly barred President Joe Biden from selling off portions of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to foreign entities. That reserve is, as its name suggests, a nationally held stockpile of energy resources, and the Biden administration made sales from the reserve amid a push to help with bringing down gas prices. Greene sounded furious about those developments, describing the initiative as trickery against the American people — which is an odd description for policy to lower the cost of gas. “Joe Biden liquidated America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to trick and deceive the People right before the last election,” she said on Twitter, echoing remarks she made on the floor of the House. Alongside those remarks, she posted a clip of Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) meant as a “gotcha!” in which he says Biden took action to lower gas prices. Is that… bad?

Are record-high gas prices not enough of a reason to use the nation’s oil reserves? On Friday, Greene saw a version of her amendment passed by the House that it seemed was significantly scaled down to the point it was barely much beyond political posturing. She described the follow-up measure as restricting Biden from making sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for political purposes — a qualification that obviously is extremely vague and could be defined any number of ways, making its immediate implementation in some kind of systematic fashion difficult to imagine, even if it took effect. Greene sounded mad at the criticism she received for her first amendment failing, complaining on the House floor on Friday about what she called the “mocking media.”

She also posted in very melodramatic terms in response to a quip on Twitter from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) about the failure. “Every successful person fails before they succeed,” Greene said on the platform. “I’m not afraid to fail, I’m afraid of our conference not working together & going far enough to stop America last policies. “Failure” resulted in leadership working with me to fix the problem.” That “fix” ended up as a significantly scaled down version of Greene’s originally proposed initiative. Greene presented her initial proposal under open rules in the House, provisions allowing for any amendment to be presented, evidently even if it doesn’t relate at all to the underlying bill.