Jordan Nuts

​And so now, Insurrection nihilist Jim Jordan is down again in his attempt to be Speaker by a vote of 2-zero.  On the good side, it took Kevin McCarthy 15 ballots, so there’s still time.  On the other hand, Jordan appears to have a whole lot less time than that, starting with he lost votes on the second ballot.  He now has 22 Republican votes against him, down from 20 the first time around, and can only afford to lose four.

But there are two other issues that I think point to bigger problems for Jordan and why he doesn’t appear to be lasting much more than one more ballot.  Perhaps two.

The first is that when Kevin McCarthy ran, the House held ballot after ballot after ballot, relentlessly pressing forward until they finally won out in the end.  With Jim Jordan, however, they’ve called a House recess after each ballot.  And then not returned for the rest of the day, which suggests that they know they’re in trouble and are working heavily to pick up votes.  And at least after the first ballot, for all that effort, they lost two votes.  (To be fully accurate, Jordan got two votes to switch to him…but lost four.)

The other thing that should be kept in mind is that when Kevin McCarthy ran for Speaker, he’d been the Republican House Leader and had been working for the Speaker job most of his career.  Jim Jordan hasn’t passed a bill in his 16 years in the House and is seen as nothing more than a naysaying obstructionist and contrarian – to the point that his fellow Republican…and fellow Ohioan…former Speaker John Bohner called him a "political terrorist”.  And so the point here is that it’s not just that Jordan is not seen as a nurturing leader, ace fundraiser and legislative whiz (three major requirements for Speaker), or that he has lost these two House votes, with the second by more than the first ballot – but, importantly lest it be forgot, Jim Jordan actually lost the GOP caucus vote to be their nominee for Speaker when he had an opponent. The only reason he’s their nominee now is because when the caucus-winner Steve Scalise saw he couldn't get the needed 217 votes in the full House, he dropped out.  Leaving only Jordan.  So, it's not like his own party actually wants him.

And it's not unreasonable to see further ballots (or ballot) become a disaster for him.  After all, there had been about 50 Republicans who were reported to be against Jordan last week, but over the weekend his team did a lot of pushing and got that number down to 20.  (Again, it had to get to four...)  And I'm sure one of the major arguments was that "Jim Jordan is going to be Speaker, you know that, there's no one else running, so it's best to get on board now, when it will be remembered."  But with Jordan losing so many votes that he became the first majority party Speaker nominee to get under 200 votes, and losing two ballots, the "inevitability" of Jim Jordan (Trump's endorsed choice, as a reminder...) becoming Speaker seems less likely by the hour.  Which means, after two losing ballots, some of those Republicans who agree to vote for him -- or a lot of them -- might start to peel off and now go down with the ship.

Finally, the other highly-important thing at issue here is that once Republicans decide what in the world they want to do -- and are able to do -- in deciding who their House leader will be, there is still a huge amount of critical political agenda that must be dealt with.  And this starts with needing to pass a budget bill that can the Democratic-led House and be signed by President Biden.  And if they can’t, the government will shut down, and it will be on the GOP, since the Senate has been pretty much in agreement on the bill.  As for the House, Republicans not only are not “pretty much in agreement” on it, but this is the very issue that got Kevin McCarthy removed as Speaker.  (I initially wrote “replaced as…” when I realized that, no, he hasn’t been replaced yet.)  And there are only 29 days left. 

Just 29 days.  And it’s taken Republicans 15 days just to decide on who they want for their leader.