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Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The thing about having someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene in your political party is that she’s useful when you want to fire with a loose cannon but inconvenient when silence or lies are in order.

Since the federal government shut down on October 1, the partisan lines in Congress have been clear. Democrats want to talk about what the GOP is doing to health care in this country via sins of both commission (the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Act) and omission (the failure to deal with an upcoming lapse in Obamacare subsidies that will create a huge premium spike for close to 20 million Americans). They are doing this because it’s their planned midterms message and also because health-care policy has been a weak point for Republicans since, well, forever. Republicans have insisted the only thing to talk about right now is the need for Democrats to support an unconditional reopening of the federal government, giving up their sole point of leverage in GOP-dominated Washington. “DON’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT HEALTH CARE” was the not-so-subliminal message emanating from every source of Republican power.

MTG either didn’t get the memo or, more likely, didn’t care. She posted an extremely long tweet on Monday that veered off into her rage at foreign-aid spending and her contention that all insurance is a “scam.” But it contained this pertinent point:

Let’s just say as nicely as possible, I’m not a fan [of Obamacare]. But I’m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district …

Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!! …

It is absolutely shameful, disgusting, and traitorous, that our laws and policies screw the American people so much that the government is shut down right now fighting over basic issues like this.

Again, NO FUNDING FOR ILLEGALS AND ANY BENEFITS FOR THEM, BUT WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE ABSOLUTELY INSANE COST OF INSURANCE FOR AMERICANS.

This last sentence was an allusion to the completely made-up GOP claim that all the money Democrats want in the way of health-care benefits will go to illegal immigrants. But calling her own party’s shutdown strategy “shameful, disgusting, and traitorous” is not what you’d call being a team player.

Worse yet, in follow-up interviews, MTG did not take kindly to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s suggestion that she didn’t know what she was talking about. Per the Washington Times:

“The reality is they never talk about it. And that committee working on, say, health insurance and the industry, that doesn’t happen in a [secure facility]. It’s not a major secret,” Greene said, adding that Johnson hasn’t reached out to discuss her concerns …

“What I am upset over is my party has no solution,” Green said. “It’s not something that we talk about frequently, but it is a reality for Americans, and it’s something that I don’t think we can ignore. I want, I really want to fix it.”

It’s true that Trump and the GOP are famously clueless on what to do with the big-picture problems of the health-care system. But saying that right now is incredibly off-message for a Republican. What probably rattles MTG’s GOP colleagues even more is that she’s not the only one worried about a health-insurance-premium spike: Every Republican running in a competitive race in 2026 is privately fretting about it. And for a breathtaking moment this week, it looked like MTG might be joined by Trump himself in abandoning the party line:

President Donald Trump said he’s negotiating health care policy with congressional Democrats and is open to making a deal on expiring health insurance subsidies, marking a potential breakthrough in the impasse over the federal government shutdown.

“We have a negotiation going on with the Democrats that could lead to good things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Oct. 6. “And I’m talking about good things with regard to health care.”

This, too, was off-message, and, presumably after receiving panicked calls from congressional Republicans, Trump walked it back with an assurance that, of course, no real negotiations could happen until Democrats reopened the government. The reality is that Trump could almost certainly impose an Obamacare subsidy deal on his Obamacare-hating congressional troops, and in fact, that’s exactly how Democrats envision the shutdown ending.

But for now, nobody on the Republican side is supposed to doubt that every problem in the country is attributable to the “Democrat shutdown,” created by a “radical left” party frantic to redistribute money from citizens to noncitizens. MTG is observing that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to an ongoing health-care-cost catastrophe that will further batter the GOP’s claims that it’s making life more affordable. And she’s not the type to accept orders to shut up.

MTG Blows Up GOP Shutdown Message With Health-Care Rant

MTG Blows Up GOP Shutdown Message With Health-Care Rant