Donald Trump's power over the Republican party is being tested by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Liz Cheney
Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Liz Cheney both faced unusual votes designed to strip away their power after sharing opposing sentiments on popular conspiracy theories.
In both cases, the Republicans voted to support them.
The mixed outcome sends a clear signal about where the party is headed without Donald Trump at its helm.
The Republicans are trying to walk a calculated middle path — not ready to reject those with extremist views who've grown vocal under Trump, but still eager to court traditional Republicans put off by that same rhetoric.
Who are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Liz Cheney?
The two US representatives symbolize two sides of the Republican party schism left in Trump's wake.
On the one side, there's Cheney, an establishment Republican and career politician, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney. As the House Republican Conference Chair, she's also the third-highest Republican in the House of Representatives.
Cheney hails from Wyoming, a deep red state that went to Trump by a margin of 44 points in 2020, but that hasn't stopped her from taking little jabs at the Trump administration over the past four years, calling for a more traditional approach to politics.
But it's her more recent comments about Trump's role in the January 6 Capitol riot that've brought the most criticism.
"The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack," she wrote in a statement on the eve of Trump's second impeachment.
"Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president."
In the end, Cheney was one of 10 Republicans — and the highest-ranking among them — who joined all 222 Democrats in the House of Representatives to vote in favour of impeaching the former president.
Less than 24 hours later, the Trump loyalists in the House pushed for an intra-party vote to remove her from her Conference Chair position.
Cheney's criticism of Trump highlighted intra-party strife
Over the next three weeks, hundreds of Cheney's constituents in Wyoming gathered to protest her anti-Trump views, even as prominent leaders across the party stepped up to defend her.
The Trump loyalists pressed on with their measure. The result was a closed-door, four-hour meeting among House Republicans.
Multiple US media outlets with inside sources said Cheney survived the secret ballot vote 145 to 61, with one member abstaining.
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters the vote showed that the party was "a very big tent" and alluded to an emerging campaign strategy to take back Congress from Democratic control in the 2022 midterms.
"Everyone's invited in. And you look at the last election, we continue to grow — and in two years we'll be in the majority," he said.
'Everyone's invited in' includes conspiracy theorists, too
If Cheney represents the Republican traditionalists who want to reject Trump, the other side of the schism is represented by Greene.
The freshman congresswomen from Georgia won her seat in the 2020 election by appealing to Trump's most fervent supporters, becoming a political firebrand before she even stepped into office.
Extensive reporting on Greene's social media accounts shows a pattern of allegiance to debunked conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic views.
Greene has pushed the "stop the steal" election fraud narrative, promoted QAnon beliefs, questioned the 9/11 attacks, speculated that California bushfires were sparked by space lasers and called for the assassination of prominent Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It the her attack on the veracity of school shootings that proved to be the biggest test after Greene was selected by the House Republicans to serve on the education committee.
Amid public pushback from Republicans and Democrats alike, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced that he supported removing Greene from the education committee, but said he would keep her second committee assignment (budget) intact.
The Democrats said this wasn't enough to prevent Greene from becoming an "embarrassment to congress," and threatened to take the unusual step of holding a vote to strip her of her committee assignments.
In the same four-hour, closed door meeting where Cheney's fate was decided, Greene allegedly expressed contrition for her comments and received a standing ovation for apologising for putting her colleagues in a tough spot. But the Republican House leadership opted not to hold a vote to decide her fate.
So the next day, the Democrats forced a vote on the resolution to strip Greene's powers.
What happened to Greene in the formal House vote?
In the end, 199 Republicans voted to support Greene and keep her on both committees.
Only 11 voted against her, meaning 54 more Republicans voted in Greene's defence than in Cheney's. It's not exactly fair to compare the two votes.
Cheney's involved a secret ballot, rendering it more a test of where those Representatives want the party to go than where the constituents may want it to go.
Prior to the vote, Greene delivered a 10-minute speech on the House floor, admitting that some of her past statements were false while stopping short of naming the harm they might have caused. Her critics said it felt less like an apology than an explanation.
What does this all say about the future of the Republican party?
This wasn't the first test of Trump's influence. It won't be the last.
In the next few weeks, Republicans will again be asked to go on the record regarding the Capitol riot, but this time it'll be in the Senate, for Trump's impeachment trial.
The vote is already shaping up to be a similar showdown.
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