It is a remarkable triumph for Jordan, long regarded as a perpetual bridesmaid in the GOP’s leadership sweepstakes, never the bride.
It was with a grim sense of resignation that I read the news fresh across the transom: The GOP leadership positions were up for a vote today. (Speaker Mike Johnson declined to run for leadership again after losing 44 of his fellow members and the House majority.) And the position of GOP minority leader has been won by Ohio’s Jim Jordan, in a 106–73 vote held behind closed doors by the post-November survivors of the GOP’s electoral wipeout.
It is a remarkable triumph for Jordan, long regarded as a perpetual bridesmaid in the GOP’s leadership sweepstakes, never the bride.
I have little to add about Jordan’s victory over former GOP Whip Steve Scalise, because I wrote my considered opinion of Jordan long ago, the last time the House Republicans faced a self-defeating drama fueled by the fractiousness of their narrow majority.
Back then the sacrificial victim was Kevin McCarthy, essentially overthrown because Matt Gaetz knew that a report naming him as a repulsive whoremonger was about to bounce him out of elected politics altogether unless he tossed a spanner into the works. Then as now, the matchup was the “radical” Jordan versus the “extremely conservative but sane” Steve Scalise. (The anonymous Mike Johnson soon emerged to thread the gap and break the stalemate between evenly matched factions.) But at a time when the choice of a new speaker had devolved into the same familiar standoff between Jordan and Scalise, I sang my definitive Greek lament to the rich classical ironies of Jordan’s career:
Why is Jim Jordan fated to be running up that hill so fruitlessly, in such humiliating fashion? Sisyphus’s great sin against the gods was that of hubris: his self-assured belief in his superior intellect and morality. Jordan’s failure is similar. Content as he has been his entire legislative career to throw bombs instead of legislate, wreak institutional havoc, and gleefully knife his fellow conference members in the back over matters of pique and self-promotion rather than principle, he is now discovering much to his surprise that some of those colleagues will never back him for any reason. Set aside for a moment the fact that opposition to Jordan’s speakership from GOP moderates is politically overdetermined. (As the Trump-endorsed House Republican avatar of January 6 and a man whose knowledge at the time of a rather dark athlete-molestation scandal in his past remains an open question, Jordan is kryptonite as the public face of an already unpopular GOP conference.)
Trust in the hard feelings instead, because they are real. Jordan’s lobbying tactics during the speakership race have been fresh evidence of that: Using his outside proxies and leveraging Donald Trump’s endorsement, he had his allies mobilize MAGA-world via an email push to pummel any and all holdouts against his bid. The predictable result? Death threats, lots and lots of death threats. (You can always count on Team MAGA to keep it classy.) Equally as obnoxiously, Jordan took to selling off Trump’s sole substantive tax-policy achievement — the cap on SALT deductions that has hit rich blue-state gentry liberals squarely in the chops — like a mess of pottage to court the votes of New York and California moderates, which puts the brutal lie to whatever “purity conservative” bona fides he spent the rest of his life accumulating like cheap participation trophies.
There is much, much more in that piece from slightly more than three years ago, and I commend it to you: There you will learn much more about Jordan’s career and why he has long been toxically unpopular with the sorts of Republicans whom he has long openly denounced for their lack of kamikaze conservative principle. Why did he win this time, after always falling short before? Why, finally, is Jim Jordan the GOP’s belle of the ball? Quite simply: because everybody who hates him — that is to say, anybody who ever lived in a marginal or somewhat threatened congressional district, across the nation — lost their election on Tuesday night. All of his enemies are gone. Jordan has won, and his victory is in itself a sign of the GOP’s shrunken appeal. It will be interesting to see what Jordan does to improve the party’s prospects, now that he has the leadership position he has craved all throughout his adult life.