UPDATE (Oct. 17, 2023 1:55 p.m. E.T.): The House has begun voting on Jim Jordan’s nomination to be speaker. Jordan lost the first ballot with 20 Republicans voting against him.
Rep. Jim Jordan is an anti-establishment firebrand, one who should have been expelled from the House for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. There’s still no guarantee that he will manage to scrape together the 217 votes he needs to become speaker. But the Ohio Republican was doing better Monday than he was Friday after a bullying campaign to rattle holdouts put him much closer to success. The firewall of 55 Republicans who’d indicated in a secret ballot that they’d never support him was reportedly crumbling, and, as of Monday, no alternative candidate had stepped up to challenge him in a floor vote.
That we’re even considering Jordan as a serious option doesn’t seem real.
That we’re even considering Jordan as a serious option doesn’t seem real. After all, this is the same Jordan whom former Speaker John Boehner, himself an Ohio Republican, described as a “legislative terrorist.” The same Jordan who has spent this Congress chairing the failed “weaponization of the federal government” subcommittee and failing to make the case that the FBI is persecuting conservatives. The same Jordan who was tapped to join the House Intelligence Committee during former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment to act as a pit bull and attack the investigation however he could.
And that’s before we get to the most egregious of Jordan’s sins: his support for Trump’s attempted reversal of the 2020 election. Jordan was one of a key group of lawmakers Trump and his advisers were in contact with in the weeks after Election Day. He was one of the loudest voices spreading Trump’s lies of election fraud and promoting the “Stop the Steal” narrative at rallies and on social media. When Trump, according to notes from a Justice Department official, said at a December 2020 meeting to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Jordan was one of the members he was counting on to help keep Joe Biden from being officially declared the winner. According to the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report, Jordan led a conference call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump and members of Congress “discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session.”
Even as a mob was ransacking the U.S. Capitol that Jan. 6, Trump’s allies were still trying to persuade Jordan to keep delaying the Electoral College vote count. We know Trump and Jordan spoke that day. We don’t know what they talked about — but that’s not because he hasn’t been asked. Jordan received a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee to testify about his role in trying to overturn the election. He refused to comply, preferring to slam the investigation as a partisan sham. And instead of punishing him for undercutting the House’s authority, Republicans instead granted him the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee this year. Now they may soon put him in charge of the entire chamber.
Jordan can’t be counted on as an ally of democracy.
This is all to say that there’s a reason Jordan was the speaker candidate who gained Trump’s endorsement. He’s the one who has been the most fiercely loyal to Trump even when it was clear that loyalty to him was wrong. Trump supports Jordan because he knows Jordan stood by him even though the evidence is clear that he’d lost. Trump even awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts to subvert the will of the American people. He will expect that token to be repaid to the best of Jordan’s ability in 2024, especially when any Electoral College tally that results in nobody getting a majority means the House would determine the winner.
House Democrats rang the alarm bells last week after Jordan won the second round of voting among the GOP caucus to become speaker-designate. “Every Republican who cast their vote for him is siding with an insurrectionist against our democracy,” House Minority Whip Kathleen Clark, D-Mass., said Friday. She’s right, but old habits die hard among the Washington press corps, which is why some framed Democrats’ warnings about Jordan as just another partisan attack. That a member of Democratic leadership would call Jordan an “insurrectionist” elicited gasps of shock from some journalists.
You can quibble about whether Jordan supported the physical attack on the Capitol. What’s beyond debate, though, is that he was more than happy to help Trump, who didn’t win in 2020, try to remain in office. Jordan can’t be counted on as an ally of democracy. In a fair world, he would have no role in making laws at all. For him to become speaker would be rewarding his support of authoritarian tyranny.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.