Jim Jordan Should Never Be Speaker

Jim Jordan has twice failed to secure the votes to become Speaker of the House of Representatives yet in his typical bull-headed, ego and thirst for power driven way, a third vote will likely betaken today.  Hopefully, there will be even more Republican defections from Jordan so that (i) his humiliation will be worse and (ii) it will be clear that he needs to cease his quest for a position for which he is utterly unfit.  In his 16 years in the House, Jordan has never passed a single bill.  Rather that being a constructive force to get things done to benefit America and average Americans, Jordan has been an obstructionist and destroyer.   Worse yet, Jordan was in the midst of the plot to overthrow the 2020 election and still faces questions of the cover up of sexual abuse during his time employed at Ohio State.  Yet in today's morally degenerated Republican Party/right wing media world Jordan is a star - something that speaks volumes about the party's moral bankruptcy.  As this ego driven drama drags on, America's image in the world suffers as Republicans put on display the reality that they are unable to govern as noted in a piece Politico even as  voters - including some Republicans - seem to be fully awaking to this reality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Jordan's unfitness (a similar column is here).  Here are excerpts:

In the melodrama that saw Jim Jordan coming all too close to being elected speaker on Tuesday and Wednesday, the country witnessed some of the best of what the U.S. House of Representatives used to be — and the worst of what it is becoming.

It does not say much for the narrow Republican majority’s capacity to govern that it is entertaining the idea — much less that nearly 90 percent of its members voted in favor — of putting in the speaker’s chair a man who prides himself on having one of the thinnest legislative records in Congress.

Even more shocking was that so many were willing to hand power to a conspiracy theorist who worked to overturn an election, who encouraged an insurrection and who, less than three weeks ago, voted to shut down the government. . . . This reckless lurch by the vast majority of House Republicans would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Trumpism has seized the House.

And yet, as Jordan fell short of a majority in votes by the full House this week, it was heartening to see a handful of his GOP colleagues stand up not only against their increasingly destructive colleagues but also the pressure of the right-wing noise machine — including the fury that was unleashed on Jordan’s behalf by Fox News megahost Sean Hannity.

These 20 or so Republicans might pay a price for the fact that they have genes of rationality and responsibility in their mitochondrial DNA. Those in deeply red districts might draw challenges in next year’s Republican primaries. The country owes them a debt.

They had different reasons for their refusal to buckle. For some, particularly those vulnerable members who represent districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, it was a calculation of political survival.

Others — including a handful of institutionalists on the Appropriations Committee — saw in Jordan’s speakership the prospect of regular government shutdowns and budget cuts so deep they would threaten national security at a time when the world is a particularly dangerous.

The selection of a speaker is something that traditionally has been a rote exercise and an insider’s game. But everyone should have seen this debacle coming. In January, it took McCarthy 15 rounds of voting to win the gavel, which was the first time something like that had happened since the Civil War era. He was the first speaker ever to lose his job by a vote of the House.

The backlash against the members who voted to remove McCarthy has been so intense that “I have a hunch you won’t see another motion to vacate in this Congress,” former speaker Newt Gingrich told me last week.

I don’t share Gingrich’s confidence that the Republicans in the House will settle down any time soon. It’s more likely that this experience will only increase the belligerence of small factions within the party.

These hard-right members and their ideological allies didn’t succeed in their efforts to install one of their own as second in line for the presidency, but that doesn’t mean they will give up on their radical goal of undermining the processes of legislation by consensus for which Congress was designed.

Some on both sides of the aisle are trying to cobble together an agreement under which Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) will have the power to bring at least some legislation to the floor, particularly aid that is urgently needed by Israel. But the fact remains that the Republican majority has ushered the House into an era unlike any it has ever experienced — one in which lurching from crisis to crisis is the only way it operates, when it operates at all.