Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy reportedly said that he would never abandon Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia after she whipped votes to help him gain the speakership earlier this month, The New York Times reported.
Ms Greene stood beside Mr McCarthy throughout the marathon 15 votes to finally clinch the gavel even as some of her fellow conservatives and members of the House Freedom Caucus such as Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Gaetz of Florida opposed him.
Mr McCarthy reportedly expressed gratitude for her to a friend of his.
“I will never leave that woman,” the Times reported him saying. “I will always take care of her.”
Mr McCarthy’s word came after she aggressively courted conservatives who opposed Mr McCarthy’s speakership. At one point when votes went late into Friday evening and Saturday morning, press photographers snapped a photo of her getting former president Donald Trump on the phone to convince Republican holdouts to support Mr McCarthy.
Initially, the two had a fraught relationship and Ms Greene believed that Mr McCarthy was out to strip her of her power. But Mr McCarthy has since defended her and criticised Democrats’ vote to remove her from her committees last year. He also went as far as to have his general counsel to make the case to Twitter executives to reinstate her personal account after it was suspended for promoting misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” he told The New York Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”
Ms Greene for her part said of Mr McCarthy that “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees”.
