Does He Really Think He Can Wear Down The Opposition?
Gym Jordan’s colleagues turned him down again. Yesterday, on ballot #2 he did even worse than he had on Tuesday. And it's widely expected that if there's another vote today, he'll do even worse than he did yesterday. Yesterday's vote once again showed Hakeem Jefferies with the most support:
Hakeem Jeffries 212
Gym Jordon- 199
Steve Scalise- 7
Kevin McCarthy- 5
Lee Zeldin- 3
Byron Donalds- 1
Tom Emmer- 1
Mike Garcia- 1
Candice Miller- 1
John Boehner- 1
Kay Granger -1
Bruce Westerman-1
Jordan gained votes from Doug LaMalfa (CA) and that crackpot from Indiana, Victoria Spartz (+ Bilirakis, who returned from a funeral in Florida)… but lost Vern Buchanan (R-FL), Drew Ferguson (R-GA), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) and Pete Stauber (R-FL).
So the 22 votes against Jordan yesterday were:
Don Bacon (NE)
Vern Buchanan (FL)
Ken Buck (CO)
Lori Chavez-DeRemer (OR)
Anthony D’Esposito (NY)
Mario Diaz Balart (FL)
Jake Ellzey (TX)
Drew Ferguson (GA)
Andrew Garbarino (NY)
Carlos Gimenez (FL)
Tony Gonzales (TX)
Kay Granger (TX)
John James (MI)
Mike Kelly (PA)
Jen Kiggans (VA)
Nick LaLota (NY)
Mike Lawler (NY)
Marionnette Miller-Meeks (IA)
John Rutherford (FL)
MikeSimpson (ID)
Peter Stauber (FL)
Steve Womack (AR)
Jordan says he’ll keep grinding it out— so, there should be another vote today. Election deniers don’t ever admit they lost. This morning, Karl Rove noted that his party's "calamity continues... [T]he House is still without a speaker more than two weeks after Kevin McCarthy was deposed by Rep. Matt Gaetz’s band of political arsonists. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan hasn’t yet persuaded, cajoled, enticed or threatened his way to 217 votes. He may not get there."
Just before yesterday’s vote, Charlie Sykes wrote that “The rationale behind Jim Jordan’s bid for the Speakership goes something like this: We have a political terrorism problem in the House, so we need a terrorist in charge to keep it under control. Only an extremist can control the extremists who would otherwise burn the place down. That logic apparently made sense to the vast majority of the House GOP. But not enough to actually turn the House of Representatives over to Jim Jordan, at least not yet. To be sure, the homunculus from Ohio could still end up with the gavel because the pattern and practice of GOP normies is usually to cave. But there is also a non-zero possibility that even in the Era of Nothing Matters, there might still be a red line. Maybe obnoxious assholery, legislative incompetence, performative demagoguery, and personal loathsomeness still have political consequences. Who knew?”
This morning, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Marianna Sotomayor and Theodoric Meyer reported that the next speaker is not going to be Gym. There is a drumbeat inside the GOP conference for him to bow out. “The number of people who vote against him on the floor will only increase with each round of balloting, Republicans say. There’s a coordinated effort among the 55 Republicans who opposed Jordan in an internal conference meeting last week to build on their votes of opposition to ensure that he loses more votes each round, according to three Republicans familiar with the plan. In other words, he loses more votes with each round he holds… Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), who doesn’t support Jordan, said that the opposition to Jordan was ‘profound’ and that the members stood against him as a matter of principle… We first reported Monday morning about the hardball tactics Jordan and his allies have undertaken to try to persuade people to support him. But they’re not working. Womack said office has received ‘nonstop’ calls from Jordan supporters, most of them from out of state, and that his staff has been ‘cussed out’ and threatened… There is a foolish move across the aisle (establishment Dems, not progressives) to empower Patrick McHenry. They know not what they do.
Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan went so far as to predict that Jordan “has no path to the speaker’s chair— and most Republicans understand that.” Jordan, however, feels like “his entire brand is wrapped up in fighting liberals and being a winner. That’s why Jordan doesn’t want to go through a third roll-call vote on the floor, especially when he could lose even more votes… [H]ardliners have lost a lot of sway inside the conference after this disaster… Jordan will be the Republican speaker designate— as meaningless as that is— while McHenry would be the speaker pro tem. McHenry will be a useful foil for Jordan under this scenario. McHenry can do what needs to be done legislatively while Jordan dumps all over it. This was the dynamic in 2015 when former Speaker John Boehner ‘cleaned the barn’ before resigning from Congress following years of conservative attacks. Paul Ryan, on the brink of the speakership, sharply criticized it.”
Ron Brownstein was thinking along the same lines: “Jordan’s advance to the brink of the speakership,” he wrote, “extends the pattern that has played out within the GOP since Donald Trump became a national candidate,” in an essay called The Threat To Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House. “The preponderant majority of House Republicans backing Jordan is attempting to elevate someone who not only defended Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election but participated in them more extensively than any other member of Congress, according to the bipartisan committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. As former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who was the vice chair of that committee, said earlier this month: ‘Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.’ Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them. That means the nation now faces the possibility of sustained threats to the tradition of free and fair elections, with Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies not only tolerated but amplified by his allies across the party.”
[Executive Director Ian] Bassin, of Protect Democracy, points to a disturbing analogy for what is happening in the GOP as Trump surges and Jordan climbs. “When you look at the historical case studies to determine which countries survive autocratic challenges and which succumb to them,” Bassin told me, a key determinant is “whether the country’s mainstream parties unite with their traditional opponents to block the extremists from power.”
Over the years, he said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”
That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.