Did Trump's Leaked Endorsement Seal The Deal For Jordan?
Well, no because it began as soon as Gaetz proposed the motion to vacate the chair. Everyone knew McCarthy was dead meat after that and Scalise and Jordan started feeling out members immediately. But the question really should have been if it’s over because Trump endorsed his ally Gym Jordan. Never mind that the last time the GOP elected a former wrestling coach involved in serial molestations of young men, that guy— Denny Hastert— wound up in prison because the Republicans refused to look into the matter before it was too late. But… what do I know?
Anyway, once Marjorie Traitor Greene’s proposal to change the rules about felons not being allowed to run for Speaker was shot down, Trump threw his weight behind Jordan. Does that help Jordan? Does it hurt him? After all, it’s a closed voting process. And if Jordan wins the backing of the GOP conference, can he still get to 218 on the House floor? Yesterday, Liz Cheney reminded her old friends that “Jordan was involved, was party of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged, as he attempted to overturn the election. And if the Republicans decide that Gym Jordan should be the Speaker of the House, if they were to decide that, there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”
Right now there are two very active candidates: Jordan and Majority Leader Scalise— who thinks it’s his turn— plus two slightly less active candidates, Kevin Hern and Patrick McHenry. On Monday Fox News will host a televised debate (moderated by Bret Baier) and Scalise, Jordan and Hern have signed up for it. Then the House Republican conference will have a closed door candidates forum the next night and, presumably, the first vote on Wednesday, although that may be changing. UPDATE: Not televised after all.
Most Republican members are worried about the same thing about the candidates— and it isn’t which is more right wing or which can appeal to mainstream conservatives or anything like that. It’s which, if any, can raise money from the big donors who underwrite the GOP. Tied to that is the question about which one can get the conference to end the civil war that has turned the GOP into a horror show, further chasing away voters.
According to Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan “it seems highly unlikely that a speaker will be chosen and approved on the House floor by next week… At this point, about one-quarter of the 221 House Republicans have committed publicly to Jordan or Scalise. Meaning neither is remotely close to nailing down a majority of the conference, let alone the 218 votes needed on the floor. Forty-five House Republicans, including several power players, have written a letter to the conference effectively demanding changes to the motion-to-vacate rule that cost McCarthy his job… A few members who signed this letter say they’re not willing to endorse for speaker until the MTV is overhauled. Important names on here include Stephanie Bice (OK); Dusty Johnson (SD), a member of the leadership; Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), a leading moderate; Garret Graves (LA), a close McCarthy ally; Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (TX); and Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (MO).”
Sherman and Bresnahan also floated several other names as compromises if there’s a deadlock: McHenry (a closet case with an incredible criminal past), French Hill (R-AR), Steve Womack (R-AR) and Tom Cole (R-OK)… and McCarthy! They wrote that they’ve “heard some House Republicans suggest they’ll nominate McCarthy to be speaker once again in the closed House GOP election. One source postulated to us that Republicans will eventually come around to the reality that no one else can get to 218— and then come back to McCarthy. Tom McClintock (R-CA) said this in a statement Thursday: ‘The only workable outcome is to restore Kevin McCarthy as Speaker under party rules that respect and enforce the right of the majority party to elect him.’ But McCarthy can’t get to 218 either, so it doesn’t matter much.”
Sherman and Bresnahan also made another valuable point: “Republicans don’t want to go to the floor and look like a bunch of clowns again by going through 15 rounds of voting.” That explains a push by Garret Graves and others “to hold off on any speaker vote on the floor until 218 Republicans have formally agreed to back a nominee.”
Over at Politico, Ryan Lizza, Rachel Bade and Eugene Daniel reported that “In Scalise world, the way to win next week’s secret ballot election is to break down the conference into granular Scalise-friendly factions that he can cobble together into a majority. Scalise is the second-most-prolific GOP fundraiser after Kevin McCarthy [maybe that’s because they were in the #1 and #2 jobs], and his team is making sure the recipients of his largesse remember that. He’s a former whip in a chamber where serving on a whip team is a bonding experience. He’s a southerner in a party that is dominated by that region of the country. He’s targeting colleagues who sit with him on the Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s counting on committee chairmen who are close to leadership and wary of Jordan’s Freedom Caucus roots. And despite the fact that he once led the Republican Study Committee, the jovial Scalise is wooing moderates freaked out by the idea of making Jordan the face of their party.”
Jordan is running a more outside game, “trying to leverage the modern conservative media world and its best-known influencers to pressure Republicans to back him”— especially now that he has Señor Trumpanzee openly campaigning for him.
The trio also reported that Troy Nehls’ and Marjorie Traitor Greene’s crackpot suggestion that Trump become speaker was derailed when “Trump allies on the Hill talked him out of it, arguing that he would not succeed in the secret ballot election, that the embarrassing loss would damage his political brand and that the way for him to have influence was to make an endorsement instead.
Their theme was whether the Trump endorsement— and Jordan’s larger outside strategy— helps, has no effect, or actually hurts him. They wrote that “if Trump makes a sustained effort to whip the vote for Jordan and push members to go public, he could create a stampede for the Ohioan, nationalizing the speaker’s race with the help of the right’s major media organs, turning it into a high-profile litmus test about loyalty to Trump. But this was a minority opinion. Most people who have been through one of these elections emphasize that they remain insider contests and that the views of anyone outside the House GOP conference are irrelevant. Trump’s Jordan endorsement will push moderates, especially vulnerable members of the New York delegation, into Scalise’s arms, the thinking here goes, while getting Jordan no new supporters. The MAGA crowd was already with Jordan… and by the end of this weekend, Trump will have lost interest in the speaker’s race and be back to focusing on his presidential campaign and his criminal trials. The brief Trump interlude of the House leadership election will be forgotten.