Jordan’s odd Friday morning news conference was ostensibly about his bid for the speakership but also focused heavily on a point of interstate tension.
At the moment — and this admittedly could change by the time I finish typing this sentence — the two people who are most likely to be leading the House by the end of this month are speaker-designate Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). The week has been spent with legislators trying to determine whether it is more viable to try to elect Jordan to serve as speaker — he is 0 for 2 — or to give McHenry more power to just skip the whole thing entirely.
On Friday morning, Jordan held an odd news conference ostensibly focused on making the case for his election as speaker, though that case generally focused on the idea that it would just be faster to elect him so why not do that? But he spent less time talking about that than he did on drawing an extended metaphor with the invention of flight.
And in doing so, intentionally or not, he elevated a deeper, often-silly feud between his state and McHenry’s.
Jordan began his comments by talking about a dinner invitation he and his wife had received. This invitation came from friends who lived down near Dayton and, for reasons that were left unexplained, would be preceded by a visit to the historic homes of Orville and Wilbur Wright. (This is presumably Hawthorn Hill, Orville’s post-success house, since the house where they grew up was bought by Henry Ford in the 1930s and moved to Michigan. It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this story, except by foreshadowing the extent to which everyone wants a piece of the Wright brothers’ legacy.
