Time to elect Marjorie Taylor Greene as speaker of the House | GARY COSBY JR.

I think it is time to elect Marjorie Taylor Greene as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. You read that right. It is time to make the loudest and perhaps the most radical voice in the House the leader.

I have not lost my mind. In fact, I think this is a brilliant strategy. If I were a Democrat in the House, I would absolutely salivate at the opportunity to put her in charge. Why, you ask, would I suggest such an obviously crazy thing?

The congresswoman from Georgia is once again holding up the House of Representatives with the threat of a vote to oust Speaker Mike Johnson because he isn’t radical enough for her. After Republicans forced then-speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy to agree to change House rules to allow only a single representative to file a challenge to his leadership, the House of Representatives has been held hostage by members of the party’s ultra-right wing.

This group of radicals, who make the Looney Tunes cartoon characters look brilliant, has essentially handcuffed the Republican Party. They threaten to, as the child on the playground who owns the baseball, take their ball and go home if things aren’t done their way. It is beyond childish. Their behavior is a national embarrassment.

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And Greene, who showed up at the most recent State of the Union address wearing a Donald Trump-inspired MAGA wardrobe, is the chief voice among this clownish element of the Republican Party. So, I think it is time to make her the speaker of the House. I think it would do her good to get a taste of her own medicine.

As I said, were I Democrat in the House, I would absolutely rejoice at the chance to fling the barbs at her that she has done to others in the House, even members of her own party. Further, I believe it would demonstrate the incompetence of this far-right group in Congress to actually govern. They have made an absolute mess of the House to this point. Why not let them go ahead and just implode in front of the whole country?

Frankly, I have not seen a time in my conscious life when a political party has more embarrassed itself than the Republicans have during the period of Trump’s influence. A party that used to provide a fairly reasonable approach to government and a balance to the Democratic Party whose tendencies have usually been opposite of theirs, has turned into a fiasco with Greene the most obnoxious voice from the radicals in the party.

The Trump influence has essentially killed the party that I had always supported and transformed it into the Party of Trump. Long before I started writing a column, I was telling people that Trump would kill the Republican Party and seriously damage Christianity. Certainly, Trump’s overhaul of the Republican Party has rendered it if not dead then absolutely remade in his image with Greene being the most visible symbol in the House of that transformation.

His co-opting of Christianity has been an embarrassment to those of the Christian faith who still place God ahead of politics. I say this knowing that many Christians supported and still support Trump, but what I mean is that his appeal to and nearly unflagging support in the Christian community has exposed American Christianity to the justifiable charge of hypocrisy in order to gain and hold political power. That, by the way, is precisely the thing that Jesus opposed in the Jewish rulers of his day. They had traded faithfulness to God for political power and influence.

This aspect of Trump’s grip on American Christianity is far more obvious to those who do not profess Christian faith than it is to those who claim Christianity, but it is quite real. If you wish to test my theory, simply talk to some unbelievers and listen to them laugh at the blindness of Christians toward the Trumps and Greenes of the world. For a person of faith, it is hard to imagine a greater tragedy than the loss of one’s ability to spread the gospel of Christ due to one’s support of a flawed politician, but that is precisely where we are.

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So my plan to elect Greene is an admittedly desperate attempt to save the Republican Party from itself. Greene was an embarrassment to even the ultra-right Freedom Caucus who kicked her out of the group last year. I say give her the reigns of power and allow her to implode in the most visible seat of power in the House of Representatives. Let the normal Republicans in the House torment her the way she has tormented others.

That’s a little Old Testament justice, but the Republican Party needs a good dose of that right now. A little bit of an eye for an eye reciprocation might bring those on the party’s far right to their senses just a little. It is, after all, not a political party we elect people to go to Washington to represent but a nation. No one needs to be reminded of that more than Greene.

Gary Cosby Jr. can be reached at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Marjorie Taylor Greene holds Republicans hostage | GARY COBSY JR.