The Nation MagazineTwo weeks after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House, the Ohio representative has failed twice to win enough votes to secure the position.
Two weeks after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House, the Ohio representative has failed twice to win enough votes to secure the position.
No, not Jim Jordan either. A chaos-ridden House Republican caucus tried to pull itself together to elect the shouty, coup-plotting chair of the Judiciary Committee its new speaker on Wednesday, after he came up 20 votes short in the Tuesday balloting. The net result of their efforts was that Jordan got two more “no” votes from Republican House members. If he was banking on the second vote to showcase his knack for persuasion, legislative bargaining, and vote counting—all indispensable skills for a House speaker—Jordan can be deemed a complete failure. That verdict was sealed on Thursday, when the House pulled the plug on a third vote that Jordan was clearly destined to lose by a still wider margin. He then threw his support behind granting Pro Tempore Speaker Patrick McHenry of North Carolina powers to move resolutions and legislation forward.
This was a rare step back from the abyss for House Republicans, given that Jordan is the moral equivalent of a Superfund site. The Ohio congressman not only was in close strategic contact with Trump administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the calamitous countdown to the MAGA insurrection on January 6; he has also defied his subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack for over a year. He’s also been an obliging outlet for high-conspiratorial Trumpist outrage, from Hunter Biden derangement syndrome to rampant Covid denialism. It’s been enough of a mindfuck for the republic, over the past nine months, to endure his conversion of the Judiciary Committee into a running show trial for senior law enforcement officials deemed insufficiently obsequious to the MAGA cause. But putting Jordan in a position to dictate the nation’s budgets, policy priorities, and committee assignments—all while being second in line to the presidency—would be an act of extreme nihilism, even for a House majority that’s already displayed breathtaking levels of nihilism-tolerance.
