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What Section 453 really means 

Section 453 doesn’t block lawsuits or give blanket immunity to pesticide companies. 

Section 453 ensures labels are based on the EPA’s safety assessment under their guidelines and keeps companies accountable when they break these. 

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Last week, as the government funding battle hardened into a stalemate, Marjorie Taylor Greene unexpectedly broke with her party. “I’m a Republican and won’t vote for illegals to have any taxpayer funded healthcare or benefits,” the Georgia congresswoman wrote on X. At the same time, she said, “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.”

To say the least, this was not the public message being advanced by Speaker Mike Johnson, who told reporters afterward that Greene was “probably not read in” on all the ways Republicans are ostensibly working to lower healthcare costs. Yet in the days that followed, M.T.G. tripled down, telling NBC News that her party “has no solution” and isn’t talking about the issue, and that she really, truly wants to fix it. Two days later, she sat down with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown on CNN to call out Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune by name for giving President Trump bad advice, ignoring the healthcare crisis, and prolonging the shutdown.

Democrats rushed to prop up Greene in a largely cynical stampede toward a congresswoman they once despised above, perhaps, all others. But with the political realignment of the last decade, at least a few Democrats said that she could be on to something. Her support for government subsidized healthcare is reflective of the populist vein running through the country that both parties are fighting to embrace. “We always liked MTG lol,” one Democratic aide texted me this week, only partially joking.

It’s certainly a plot twist. Before she even stepped inside the Capitol, in 2021, Greene said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “deserved death” for opposing Trump’s border wall and called for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to be hanged. Then she got sworn in and wasted no time waging culture war against her Democratic colleagues, pushing to censure Muslim Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

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Also: M.T.G. screamed at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of supporting Antifa. She publicly beefed with office hallmate Cori Bush over Covid policies, and got into a screaming match with Rep. Debbie Dingell after a vote on abortion. Recently, she mocked Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes during a House hearing.

But times have changed both for Democrats who need Republican allies, and for Greene, who is increasingly charting her own political future. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has praised Greene at press conferences, calling her defense of Obamacare subsidies “correct.” The D.C.C.C., the House Democrats’ campaign arm, placed a digital ad on conservative websites with a picture of a smiling Greene—unusual pictography for Democrats—with the overlay, “M.T.G. is right. Not a single Republican … has given us a plan to help Americans.” Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, who served with Greene in the House and was no fan, posted a video of himself saying they are “100 percent in alignment” on the A.C.A. issue. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the centrist Democrat who is working on a deal to end the shutdown, touted Greene’s interview on CNN.

Of course, the praise for Greene is mostly opportunistic. My Democratic sources are obviously skeptical that a woman who blamed January 6 on Black Lives Matter is transforming into some kind of bleeding heart. Yet Greene’s break with her party—on healthcare as well as on Israel, which she has accused of genocide in Gaza, and on the Epstein files, which she wants released—could be a signal of things to come. The political landscape is shifting dramatically in the age of Trump, who has harnessed widespread anti-establishment anger over a system that many see as rigged for elites against the working class.

But the president’s own populist instincts have not always translated to policy: He recently signed one of the largest tax cuts disproportionately benefiting corporations and the top 10 percent of income earners. Perhaps Greene, whose state has the 14th-highest poverty rate in the U.S., is more in touch with the future of the party than the president himself.

As I reported in August, this isn’t the first time Greene has broken with the Republican orthodoxy. She still calls Trump “the greatest president,” but has resisted his pressure to drop her demand that the Epstein files be released. On foreign policy, besides condemning Israel, she’s also criticized Trump’s attacks on Iran. Plus, she’s been vocally opposed to the deregulatory A.I. agenda favored by the White House. She told the Daily Mail this past summer that “the Republican Party has turned its back on America First and the workers and just regular Americans.”

Among the Democrats who understand Greene’s evolution is Rep. Ro Khanna, who has lately been spending a lot of time with her, as a co-sponsor of the Epstein resolution that Greene has signed on to—and, he told me, as a thought partner on lowering the cost of living. They might have legislation to show for it, soon. Khanna, who is considering grander political ambitions beyond the House in 2028, said his work with Greene “represents the possibility of building an anti-status quo coalition that tackles government corruption and income inequality and begins to bridge the rural and urban divides in our nation.”

Maybe so, but other Democrats see political risk in Greene’s positioning—for Democrats. One Democratic aide called her a “dangerous Venn diagram” who appeals to a cross-section of people as a “pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide, anti-woke, right-wing woman who can speak to young men and cares about healthcare.” In other words, she’s managed to co-opt some of Democrats’ strongest issues even as she continues to appeal to a MAGA base. So maybe Dems should be worried.

Republicans probably should be too, though many I spoke to said they were simply confused. Some surmise that she’s frustrated with the president; someone else said that M.T.G., like many others, is embittered about serving in a Congress that does very little even when the government is open. Others say she’s just being opportunistic, and yet others acknowledge her skills at reading the base and speaking for her Georgia constituents. “She’s a woman of very deep convictions,” Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told me. “I can’t condemn her. She has always been pretty good about knowing about what’s going on in the country.”

Mostly, though, they’re treating Greene’s posture as a non-issue. As one senior Republican aide told me, the party has a lot more to deal with than the comments of a controversial member who is rarely a team player. Plus, leadership aides say, although Greene has amassed millions of social media followers and a robust fundraising network, she doesn’t actually have much influence within the Capitol: She got kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus and hasn’t been close with leadership since the downfall of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Retiring Rep. Don Bacon, a centrist from Nebraska, told me that he’s only had one conversation with her—and that was when he congratulated her on her election in 2021. But she does speak for many within the conservative base, which might be the only coalition she needs.

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