A dark cloud of uncertainty hangs over Capitol Hill as Congress approaches its two-week mark without a speaker of the House. Republican members will convene on Monday evening for yet another closed-door conference meeting to discuss continuing disagreements over their new nominee, House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan, and whether he can secure the 217 Republican votes required to win the gavel in a floor vote tentatively scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
As of this writing, the pendulum is swinging in Jordan’s favor. The pro-Jordan camp is betting that, unlike hardline conservative members — many of whom stalled McCarthy’s January speakership bid and are used to being a thorn in House GOP leadership’s side — mainstream Republican holdouts are not used to getting flak from grassroots conservative groups and will cave when the vote moves to the House floor. As of Monday afternoon, that strategy was already paying dividends, with three avowed “no” votes — Representatives Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), Ken Calvert (R., Calif.), and Ann Wagner (R., Mo.) — all signaling in public statements that they will reverse course and back Jordan’s bid.
This is quite the turnaround from last week, when Jordan’s chances of securing the speakership looked slim. Shortly before members convened on Capitol Hill for a 1:00 p.m. speaker-candidate forum on Friday to formally nominate Jordan, Representative Austin Scott (R., Ga.) threw his hat in the ring in what was broadly understood by many House members as an eleventh-hour attempt to block the Ohio Republican’s leadership bid.
The effort proved successful in at least temporarily stalling momentum behind Jordan. The Ohio Republican bested Scott in a head-to-head match-up by a 124–81 vote. And in a follow-up vote that asked whether members will support Jordan on the House floor, a whopping 55 voted “no.”
Over the weekend, some members struggled to answer whether they were confident Jordan could realistically shore up 217 votes in conference. “You know what? I don’t know, I don’t,” Representative Derrick Van Orden (R., Wis.), who supported Jordan’s bid, told National Review Friday afternoon.
Intra-party relations are so splintered that only 209 of the House Republican conference’s 221 members even bothered to show up for Friday’s closed-door meeting. House Republicans started dropping like flies even earlier in the week — what now feels like a century ago in House-GOP time — when it became clear that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s short-lived speaker bid was losing momentum. One member rushed past reporters out of Thursday’s closed-door meeting, telling National Review that he had better things to do than waste time hashing out disagreements with his colleagues, who, in this member’s view at least, have no interest in governing.