Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Been Obsessed With AOC for Years

On Thursday, a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Committee descended into chaos after repeated outbursts from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Tensions throughout the proceeding reached a tipping point in a heated exchange between Greene, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) after Greene made a comment attacking Crockett’s appearance.

The Republican-controlled committee had gathered to advance a resolution seeking to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress after a similar resolution had passed in the House Judiciary Committee earlier that day.

Greene derailed the hearing by bringing up Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal hush money trial, demanding members of the committee reveal if any of them were working with the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s trial. Republicans have cited Merchan’s daughter’s job as a political fundraiser as proof that Merchan can not be an impartial judge..

“Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland,” Crockett responded. “Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here about AG Garland?”

Greene countered that Crockett’s “fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Democrats on the committee jumped to defend their colleague, demanding that Greene’s attack against Crockett’s appearance be stricken from the record.

“That is absolutely unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”

Greene refused to apologize for the comment, sarcastically asking Ocasio-Cortez if her “feelings” were hurt.

“Oh, girl. Baby girl, don’t even play,” Ocasio-Cortez countered at one point in the exchange.

Greene then revived her longstanding, unfulfilled demand towards Ocasio-Cortez: Debate me.

“Why don’t you debate me?” Greene said, accusing Ocasio-Cortez of not having “enough intelligence” to handle a one-on-one confrontation.

It’s not the first time Greene, the Attention Seeker in Chief of the 118th Congress, has hassled AOC in an attempt to engineer a viral moment.

In 2019, when Greene was not yet a member of the House, she live-streamed herself yelling through the mail flap of Ocasio-Cortez’s office door, demanding that the congresswoman come out so she could confront her. The video, which resurfaced in 2021, prompted Ocasio-Cortez to refer to Greene as “deeply unwell” and of harboring a years-long fixation on the New York congresswoman.

“We’re going to go see, we’re going to visit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Crazy eyes. Crazy eyes. Nutty. Cortez,” Greene tells the camera in the video. When she reached the locked door, surrounded by an entourage of other right-wing activists, Greene demanded she “stop being a baby and stop locking your door and come out and face the American citizens that you serve.”

“If you want to be a big girl, you need to get rid of your diaper and come out and be able to talk to the American citizens. Instead of having to use a flap, a little flap. Sad,” she added.

In 2020, Greene posted a photo on her Facebook page of herself posing with an assault rifle next to a photo of Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the progressive “Squad,” including Reps., Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). It’s time to go on the “offense against these socialists,” Greene wrote.

In April of 2021, Green once again re-upped her demands that Ocasio-Cortez debate her on the House floor over the Green New Deal. The one-sided fixation included a video from Greene in which she described Ocasio-Cortez as “a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy or economics.”

“She just has a government job,” Greene added, as if she and Ocasio-Cortez don’t have exactly the same job title. Days after posting the video, Greene chased Ocasio-Cortez when she left the House floor and screamed at her, accusing her of supporting “terrorists and antifa.” The stunt drew backlash from other members of Congress, even fellow Republicans like Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who felt that screaming matches in the halls were beneath the dignity of the office. Greene would continue to rail about the encounter on social media, calling Ocasio-Cortez and other Progressive women of color serving in the House the “#JihadSquad.”

Last year, the pair once again traded barbs on Twitter after Greene again reiterated her demands for a debate after Ocasio-Cortez correctly pointed out that the Georgia congresswoman has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories in the past.

“I have repeatedly asked you to debate me, but you have been a coward and can’t even respond,” Greene wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “But you go on CNN and lie about me.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded by taking a jab at how infrequently Greene actually showed up to debates in the Oversight Committee. “In case you forgot, we sit on the same committee, which debated for the first time this week,” she wrote on Feb. 3, 2023. “I don’t blame you if you forgot. You spent almost no time there. In the few minutes you did show up.”

An irate Greene responded by attacking her rival’s past work as a bartender.

Thursday’s explosive Oversight Committee hearing was a long time coming — and it was only a matter of time before Greene’s affinity for aggressive theatrics against her fellow lawmakers was captured in full view of CSPAN’s cameras instead of by unfortunate bystanders. In 2022, Greene and fellow Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) reportedly almost came to blows during a House Freedom Caucus meeting, to the point that someone had to step in between them to de-escalate the confrontation. Last year, the pair fell into a screaming match inside a bathroom near the House floor, and months later Greene called Boebert a “little bitch” during a dispute over articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden.

Greene’s personal vendettas regularly spill over into petty name-calling and childish outbursts that derail the business of government. She gets away with it because — much like a parent dreads the prospect of a public tantrum — House Republican leadership coddles and excuses her behavior at every turn.

On Thursday, after Greene leveled her attacks at Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez, Republicans on the committee voted to strike down two attempts to have her comments removed from the record. In response, Rep. Crockett posed a hypothetical to Committee Chair James Comer. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling,” Crockett said. “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

Comer reacted in confusion, as fellow committee Republicans in turn demanded that Crockett’s words be stricken from the record, once again spiraling the debate into an uncontrolled screaming match.

“Y’all talk noise, and then you can’t take it,” Crockett declared.

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