On Friday, after 55 House Republicans said they would refuse to vote for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on the House floor, his path to the speakership looked impossible. But just a few days later, with a vote scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and opposition vanishing, his rule seemed inevitable.
Almost.
Jordan still had a handful of GOP votes to flip as of late Monday night. But the fact that the archconservative Ohio Republican—dubbed a “legislative terrorist” by a GOP speaker not even 10 years ago—was now on the brink of assuming the most powerful office in the U.S. Capitol, stands testament to the House GOP’s far-right transformation
ADVERTISEMENT
That Jordan could succeed where former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his longtime No. 2 Steve Scalise both failed is reflective of two fundamental truths in the House Republican conference: Moderates don’t have the stomach for obstructionism like conservatives, and the GOP conference writ large is much closer ideologically to Jordan than it is to any moderate Republican.
Indeed, the term “moderate Republican” is a bit of a misnomer in the House of Representatives today. While there may be Republicans who are willing to work with Democrats, the majority of the conference voted to overturn the 2020 election—including Jordan, McCarthy, and Scalise.
In the most high-stakes fights, the party’s moderates just aren’t as willing to use their leverage to pull Republicans back from the edge, partially because they don’t have the stomachs, and partially because they don’t have the numbers.
The bloc of GOP lawmakers opposed to Jordan for ideological, political, and personal reasons far outnumbered the eight who booted McCarthy from the speakership two weeks ago. If they wanted to, anti-Jordan members could block his path to the gavel and force the party to come up with a more agreeable candidate—potentially even a moderate Republican who could win some Democratic support.
Despite their overwhelming anger and frustration with how a small breakaway faction upended the party and threw the House into turmoil, Republicans simply aren’t willing to employ hardball tactics of their own to win.
One by one, GOP lawmakers—colloquially known as “moderates” or “institutionalists” or “establishment Republicans”—have recanted the unequivocal opposition to Jordan they expressed just days ago and thrown their support behind him.
The abrupt shift surprised Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who said on Monday afternoon that he believed “a bipartisan compromise speakership was inevitable just 24 hours ago.”
“The responsible governing types in the Republican conference,” Huffman lamented, “just fold like a cheap suit every time.”
Noting Jordan’s leading efforts to contest the outcome of the 2020 election based on bogus voter fraud claims, Huffman said the fact that Jordan “is going to be holding the gavel in the institution that counts the electoral votes… that is terrifying, frankly.”
“It’s just stunning that all of these Republicans would go along with it,” he said.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), for instance, bluntly said last Friday that there was nothing Jordan could do to win his vote. By Monday, Rogers tweeted that he had “two cordial, thoughtful, and productive conversations over the last two days” with Jordan. “As a result, I have decided to support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House on the floor,” Rogers said.
Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), a close ally of Scalise, fumed over how Jordan seemed to knife the Louisiana Republican after Jordan lost the first closed-door speaker vote to Scalise last week. Wagner told reporters she would “absolutely not” vote for Jordan on the floor. On Monday morning, Wagner released a statement saying she would, in fact, vote for Jordan on the floor.
One of the most vulnerable GOP incumbents, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), told Politico New York that if Jordan “has the votes, I’ll probably just vote for him,” saying “we have to get back to work.” (On Monday evening, Lawler told CNN’s Jake Tapper he would vote for McCarthy at this point, but it’s easy to see him flipping if he’s the deciding vote.)
While lawmakers like Rogers and Wagner cited personal conversations with Jordan that mitigated their concerns, it’s obvious that Jordan’s allies have orchestrated a comprehensive pressure campaign to flip holdouts by subjecting them to the fury of a party base that is now fully engaged in the speaker race.
The anti-Jordan faction’s biggest advantage was strength in numbers. But that advantage has now vanished, meaning the handful of lawmakers who could stand up to him are poised to face concentrated outrage.
On Sunday, Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke tweeted an email sent to an unnamed lawmaker by a producer for Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, pressing them on why they had not supported Jordan yet.
Meanwhile, pro-Jordan lawmakers with big right-wing social media followings, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), promoted a list kept by Breitbart News keeping track of who had and had not backed Jordan. MAGA accounts with six-figure followings tweeted out false information that GOP holdouts had pledged to back a Democrat for speaker, when none of them had done so.
Jordan’s camp distanced themselves from the notion that their camp was pressuring holdouts, but every GOP lawmaker is crystal clear on the political risk of standing up in a roll call vote to block Jordan’s path from the speakership—likely a primary challenge back home.
Even if Jordan fails to win the speakership on the first, second, or additional rounds of voting, the fact that he managed to flip dozens of dedicated detractors in the span of a few days will go down as one of the most abrupt shifts any party has seen in congressional history. And Jordan seems to be accomplishing his feat without the traditional carrots that a speaker candidate wields—like committee assignments, chairmanships, or legislative promises.
And if Jordan does pull off the speakership, the efficacy of the agitator playbook will be clear: deny more moderate Republicans the speakership, then bend the conference to your conservative will.
Huffman noted that, even if Jordan gets the speakership, Jordan holdouts might face primary challenges anyway, no matter what they do now—that’s how fired up and vengeful the GOP base is.
“Their political ecosystem is completely unforgiving and punitive, and there’s just no room to question it,” he said. “This is it. It’s the purification of the MAGA movement.”
A Jordan speakership, unthinkable even earlier this year, now appears to be the GOP’s most plausible way out of the historic leadership crisis that began on Oct. 3, when eight Republican lawmakers successfully removed McCarthy from the speakership.
Some Republicans still look at Jordan’s resume and remain in shock as to how he got to the doorstep of the Speaker’s Office.
Jordan is the founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, which he made a force by pioneering a strategy of combining zero-sum legislative tactics with hardcore commitment to right-wing ideology. At numerous points in his career, he has successfully helped steer a GOP majority toward a government shutdown—first in 2013 in protest to the Affordable Care Act, and then again in 2018 over immigration.
Such tactics made Jordan a persistent enemy of GOP leadership. But even as he grew closer to the fold of McCarthy and others, he continued his trend of routinely voting against bipartisan budget and appropriations deals. He is a stalwart opponent of abortion access and refused to support GOP legislation to repeal Obamacare in 2017 unless it removed protections for people with pre-existing conditions. A close ally of Donald Trump, Jordan has steadfastly refused to affirm the 2020 election outcome and amplified false claims of fraud.
Jordan’s ascendance now speaks not just to the dearth of willpower among moderates, but the particular ruthlessness of Jordan’s strategy and how ill-prepared his rivals have been to account for it.
The most obvious successor to McCarthy was Scalise, and in a closed door vote last week, the popular majority leader earned a clear majority of GOP votes to earn the nomination for speaker over Jordan. The Ohio Republican stepped aside and reportedly offered to nominate Scalise on the floor, but only if Scalise promised to do so for him if he failed to win on the first vote.
Jordan’s allies, meanwhile, came out of the woodwork to pledge that they would never vote for Scalise on the floor. Realizing he might not prevail in a lengthy series of floor votes, like the one McCarthy endured in January, Scalise bowed out of contention on Thursday.
After that, Jordan put his name back in contention for the speaker nomination. And even though he only faced token opposition—from Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA), a backbencher who stood only as a protest vote—Jordan eked out a victory on Friday, with a huge chunk of the conference registering their opposition. In a subsequent vote, 55 lawmakers said they wouldn’t support him on the floor.
Instead of bowing out, however, Jordan worked his critics—and allowed his allies to jack up the pressure. That two-pronged strategy, along with the general fatigue in the GOP conference over the chaos and the ongoing paralysis of the House, seemed to rapixdly diminish the ranks of Jordan opponents. Notably, McCarthy expressed public confidence that Jordan would win—backing that Scalise, his longtime rival, never secured.
But if Jordan’s approach publicly appeared to be all stick and no carrot, details began to emerge on Monday that indicated the Ohio Republican might make the same sorts of bargains to win power that doomed McCarthy.
For one, some GOP lawmakers seem to be under the impression that Jordan would advance a package that includes aid for Israel as well as aid to Ukraine, according to Axios. While Jordan’s aides forcefully deny any such agreement—which would be a red line for the MAGA wing—the ambiguity of such a deal speaks even further to the flexibility of Jordan’s more moderate detractors.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said Monday night that Jordan told him “he could see” Ukraine aid being paired with Israel aid.
What is clear is that Jordan had to make some bargain to attract defense hawks like Rogers, the Armed Services chairman.
On Monday afternoon, Jordan tweeted a list of priorities to “destroy Hamas and support Israel.”
Notably, that last tenet—“replenish drained US stockpiles”—could apply to Ukraine aid, particularly if it were sold to Republicans as an increase to the president’s “drawdown authority” for weapons, which he in turn sent to Ukraine.
That strategy would have the added bonus of giving Republicans a political issue to attack President Biden over—executive overreach to send military aid that the public and the GOP base has turned against—while also fulfilling a key goal for many Republicans: dismantling the Russian army.
To be sure, some Republicans remain livid that a super-minority of lawmakers were able to oust a popular speaker, block the next consensus choice, and then elevate a pick with minority support to the top position.
“The folks yelling we need to put out the house fire, started the fire,” tweeted Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), a leading moderate, on Monday evening. “This started when 4% of Republicans voted to remove Speaker McCarthy. Then, we had another group refuse to support Scalise after he won by our rules. We can’t have a process when a few break the rules.”
And Jordan still faces on-the-record opposition from a handful of Republicans: Bacon, Lawler, Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Steve Womack (R-AR), John Rutherford (R-FL), Ken Buck (R-CO), and Carlos Gimenez (R-FL)—while a much larger number of Republicans still hadn’t disclosed where they stand on Jordan as of Monday evening.
But it’s clear that Jordan is getting close, and even if he’s denied the speakership on the first vote, it seems unlikely that he’ll just give up now. It’s much more likely that a few individuals will fold, just like they did with McCarthy in January.
