In a secret ballot on October 20, House Republicans dumped Speaker-designate Jim Jordan after he lost a third bid for the position in a formal House vote. In light of this humiliation, it’s worth asking why he persisted in his pursuit of the gavel even as he fell well short of the necessary 217 votes and steadily lost ground.
It’s important to recall how Jordan became a viable candidate for this position in the first place. He was (and perhaps remains) the one plausible House GOP leader who could placate the hard-core conservative rebels who took down Kevin McCarthy and who pose all kinds of nihilistic trouble down the road. That calculation hasn’t changed despite the backlash against Jordan and his heavy-handed backers from a floating coalition of McCarthy and Scalise loyalists, non-MAGA conservatives, and appropriators.
So Jordan was inclined to keep pounding away at the opposition on the theory that if he cannot win 217 votes, neither can anyone else. That made potential Jordan allies of the very institutionalists who despise everything he and the House Freedom Caucus stand for, since restoring the House’s ability to function remains their top priority. Ben Jacobs recently noted the odd nature of the Jordan coalition of hostage-takers and hostages:
Bob Good, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, insisted Jordan was “the second most popular Republican in the country” and would appeal to “the grassroots Republican base” who consume only conservative media and are convinced that Republican failures in Washington are simply because their elected officials are always too weak.
“I think he’s the best chance we have to stay out of a shutdown, and he’s the best chance to get our base and conservative media to buy into what we’re doing,” Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told reporters on Monday regarding why he was supporting Jordan.
In the end the terrible negative publicity Jordan and House Republicans harvested for a bid that looked horrifically egocentric outweighed the odds that the logic of a Jordan speakership would eventually overcome the grumbling elements of the House GOP conference.
But now that Jordan has been slapped down, it’s important to grasp why he was willing to go as far as he did in pursuing a position well beyond his reach.
The crisis of the House GOP that flared up when McCarthy was deposed is principally the product of a untenably narrow majority. Republicans are optimistic that in 2024 Donald Trump will lead them to a big national win that will also flip the Senate and expand the GOP’s House majority. It’s a scenario in which the House is no longer an isolated and self-referential island of Republican power in which “messaging bills” and ideological gestures are supreme, and in which rebels like Matt Gaetz may have no leverage at all. Trump himself would no longer be an incendiary outsider happy to foment rebellion in the House, but a president who needs to operate through a functioning Congress. The coalition Jordan tried to assemble would not longer exist.
So even if it looked like Jordan was no longer striking while the iron was hot in seeking the speakership, it could be ice cold in the next hypothetically Republican Congress. By 2025, moreover, it’s possible this would-be Speaker will have new horizons as a Cabinet member or White House potentate in a second Trump administration. As a pol whose interest in actual legislative productivity is limited at best, there was no particular reason Jim Jordan should have felt the need to get out of the way and let others try to tame the unruly beast that is the House Republican conference. We’ll now find out if anyone can.
