Marjorie Taylor Greene is still who Democrats think she is
By Michael Jones
If you were playing Shutdown Bingo, you probably didn’t have Marjorie Taylor Greene on your card as one of the loudest voices in Congress calling to extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits—a key Democratic demand to end the current funding lapse.
In case you missed it: Greene recently accused GOP leaders of having no plan to lower premiums or help families struggling with costs, saying her own adult children’s insurance rates were set to double. Though she reiterated her opposition to the ACA—calling it a “scam”—she publicly backed Democrats’ push to extend the subsidies beyond the end of the year, describing the move as part of an “America-only” approach.
Democrats immediately pounced. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) highlighted her tweet on a poster board at his daily shutdown press conference, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) referenced her remarks on the Senate floor, and the House Democrats’ campaign arm turned her comments into a talking point about Republican hypocrisy. For Democrats, Greene’s admission that the GOP lacks a plan on health care is proof that the Republican Party’s internal chaos is leaving voters to fend for themselves.
They also viewed it as a turning point in the politics of affordability. After months of searching for a unifying economic issue, Democrats are owning the health care conversation again by exposing how out of touch Republicans have become—even to their own members. It’s also an opportunity to show that the ACA’s continued popularity is reshaping political incentives on both sides of the aisle, forcing even MAGA hardliners to acknowledge what voters have long known: health care costs remain the kitchen table issue of our time.
But not all Democrats are ready to fully embrace MTG, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who has had her fair share of verbal feuds with the MAGA firebrand.
“It’s important when someone from the other side can kind of be like, ‘OK, yeah, OK, we’re not that lost,’” Crockett told me. “Now I think that Marjorie has read the tea leaves. She obviously has made this very personal about her sons and what’s going to happen to them, but she does have enough money that if she decided that she was going to pay their premiums for them, she could, if I’m being perfectly honest. But that’s not necessarily an option for a lot of people.”
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) has similar thoughts.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene came to the right conclusion, she said, because she talked to her children and their premiums were going to go up,” she told me. “Well, they should be talking to their constituents, because, yes, that’s her family, but it shouldn’t take just your family being affected because everybody represents more than 700,000 people.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told me she was asked about Greene during a town hall last week and said that despite their disagreements, she believed it was important to acknowledge when someone says or does the right thing.
“Let’s welcome in comments that are truthful about the situation on the ground, even if we have to also call out the lies that Marjorie Taylor Greene or anyone else might say.”
Jayapal added that courage often begets courage, and Greene’s willingness to break with GOP leadership on extending the tax credits could permit others to do the same.
“So let’s see if any of these Republicans have a little bit of courage.”
Opposition to the Affordable Care Act has been a defining marker of the Republican Party’s identity since its passage in 2010. The law—signed by former President Barack Obama after a yearlong legislative brawl—became shorthand for everything conservatives claimed to despise about government overreach. GOP lawmakers have voted more than 60 times to repeal or defund the ACA, denouncing it as a job killer and government takeover of health care, even as millions of Americans gained coverage through its marketplaces and Medicaid expansion.
That fight defined an entire generation of Republican politics. It fueled the Tea Party wave, helped Republicans retake the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2015, and remained a rallying cry throughout Donald Trump’s rise to power. When Trump entered the White House promising to repeal and replace Obamacare on day one, Republicans finally had the power to deliver. Yet after seven years of promises, the effort collapsed dramatically on the Senate floor in 2017 when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then battling brain cancer, gave a historic thumbs-down to the GOP’s last-ditch repeal bill.
That moment ended the party’s most sustained legislative crusade of the modern era, but it didn’t end the political war over health care. Republicans have continued to undermine the ACA through lawsuits, administrative rollbacks and budget proposals that chip away at its core protections. And now, as health care costs climb again, the GOP finds itself caught between a populist base demanding relief and a policy playbook still built around tearing down the law that made coverage more accessible for millions.
When Democrats took control of Washington in 2021, one of their first moves was to strengthen the Affordable Care Act’s financial assistance for Americans buying coverage on the insurance exchanges. The American Rescue Plan, passed without a single Republican vote, temporarily expanded premium tax credits to make coverage more affordable for middle-class families and eliminate costs for some low-income Americans. For the first time, no one purchasing insurance through the ACA marketplace would be forced to spend more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.
The change drove record enrollment and slashed the number of uninsured Americans to its lowest level in history. But the relief was designed to be temporary—set to expire after two years—prompting Democrats to act again in 2022. Through the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed along party lines, they extended the enhanced tax credits through 2025, preventing millions of Americans from seeing steep premium hikes.
Republicans opposed both measures, claiming they added to federal spending and distorted the insurance market. Yet the results are hard to ignore: roughly 21 million people are now covered through the ACA marketplaces, and the enhanced credits remain one of the most popular provisions of President Biden’s economic agenda. As the expiration deadline looms once again, Democrats are pressing to renew the subsidies—while Republicans, divided on whether to replace or roll them back, still haven’t offered a clear alternative.
It may be because the enhanced premium tax credits didn’t just help blue states. They transformed health coverage in Republican strongholds, too. Rural counties and small towns across the South and Midwest, many of which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, have some of the highest ACA enrollment rates in the country. In states like West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma, thousands of middle-income families who don’t qualify for Medicaid rely on these subsidies to afford private insurance.
The ARP and IRA supercharged that support in red states that refused to expand Medicaid. In Texas and Florida—two Republican-led states that rank first and second in overall marketplace enrollment—the majority of enrollees live in GOP-leaning congressional districts. Even in places where lawmakers still rail against “Obamacare,” the program has quietly become an economic lifeline, stabilizing rural hospitals and keeping insurance within reach for self-employed workers, small business owners and retirees not yet eligible for Medicare.
This disconnect—between the politics of repeal and the reality of dependence—helps explain why MTG’s comments hit a nerve. Her own district, like many deep-red parts of the country, has benefited from the very subsidies she derides. As premiums rise and cost pressures deepen, Republicans find themselves caught in a bind: Voters in their own backyard are living proof that the law they’ve spent more than a decade trying to dismantle now underwrites their communities’ health security.
Still, some Democrats are unimpressed with Greene’s vocal support for extending the ACA subsidies because just over three months ago, she voted for President Trump’s signature legislative achievement that slashed a trillion dollars in Medicaid and SNAP investments.
“Health care should not be partisan,” Crockett told me. “But frankly, SNAP benefits shouldn’t be partisan either. That’s just very human. This is about humanity, and we have been trying to get these people [to understand], whether it’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or whether it is around food, or whether it is around the tariffs, or whether it is around our general safety in this country when we’re looking at the gun violence numbers.”
And despite Greene’s influence in the MAGA universe, several of those same Democrats told me they doubted her position would ultimately sway Johnson because she’s not who the speaker is taking his marching orders from.
“When you’ve got Marjorie standing together with the likes of the Democrats on something, that should send a signal,” Crockett said. “Now, is it a signal that the speaker cares about? I don’t think so, because the speaker definitely is doing whatever it is that Donald Trump wants him to do, instead of doing what makes sense for his people in his district. But when we fight, we don’t just fight for our constituents, we fight for all Americans.“
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
