Jim Jordan’s march to seize the Capitol began as a beer hall putsch but veered into Sesame Street. Vote after vote, he has missed the sagacity of the Count, the puppet Dracula who teaches children the number of the day. Former speaker Nancy Pelosi wryly remarked that the Republicans should “take a lesson in mathematics and learning how to count”.
After the second round, Jordan threw in the towel from his stool in the corner: no más! He endorsed instead extending the tenure and power of Patrick McHenry, the speaker pro tempore, until someone could figure something else out. But Jim Jordan the consensus builder was a short-lived phenomenon. The spirit of violence swirled around him.
The House Republicans held a closed conference to deliberate. The ghostly Kevin McCarthy, the late speaker, stood to create order, though it was unclear what that order would be or what authority he invoked. Matt Gaetz, his assassin, rose to answer him. “Sit down!” McCarthy shouted. Foul oaths flew back and forth. “If you don’t sit down, I’ll put you down,” Representative Mike Bost told Gaetz. Gaetz gestured for him to come and fight. But the one who suffered a TKO was McHenry.
Once again, Jordan had neglected to count. His followers did not follow him. “It’s the biggest F U to Republican voters I’ve ever seen,” said Jordan’s rabid advocate Representative Jim Banks. Another backer, Representative Scott Perry, Jordan’s successor as chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a fellow co-conspirator in the January 6th plot, rejected the McHenry gambit out of hand. “I’m going to stay with Mr Jordan to the end,” he declared. The collapse came quickly, with McHenry declining the honor. “If there is some goal to subvert the House rules to give me powers without a formal vote, I will not accept it,” he said, as he too proclaimed his allegiance to Jordan while politely sideswiping him.
Outside the paralyzed House, a gaggle of Never Trump, anti-Jordan Republicans conjectured about performing a magic trick. Would Senator Mitt Romney take the speakership? He had announced he was not running for re-election; he could sit in the Senate at the same time he presided over the House. But then there was the book about him by McKay Coppins of the Atlantic in which, in a final act of belated truth-telling, Romney flayed each and every Republican leader. And, anyway, why would he accept the nomination to preside in hell? What about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Would the former California governor, flogging his guide to life lessons, be willing to lift the dead weights of the House? The other possibilities for a deus ex machina were even less plausible. These scenarios were more fanciful than casting during the actors’ strike.
The Democratic House leaders, who have a ringside seat to the Republican chaos, have long believed that Gaetz was always Jordan’s cat’s paw. After credulous pundits blamed the unity of the Democrats for the shambles of the Republicans, even attributing it to “identity politics”, the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, offered the glimmer of a “bipartisan” coalition whenever breakaway Republicans would be willing to deal practically. But until the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the Democrats can do little but watch the Republicans’ crash landings. Aid for Israel? Ukraine? Border security? The world crisis is secondary to the petty vindictiveness of Republican strife.
From the start, Jordan’s campaign counted on coercion. The Fox News host Sean Hannity made calls to recalcitrant members demanding to know why they were not in lockstep behind Jordan and urged his viewers to send angry messages to change hearts and minds. Steve Bannon, on his War Room podcast, instructed his listeners to target the office of Representative Steve Womack, who had not fallen into line. Gaetz, a guest on Bannon’s program, excitedly announced that one notable holdout, Representative Mike D Rogers, had joined the “Jordan train”.
“It seems as though Congressman Rogers has been sufficiently encouraged,” boasted Gaetz about the efficacy of the threats. But this whip operation had its limits. When Representative Don Bacon voted for McCarthy, not Jordan, on the second ballot, the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade blurted on-air: “Dumbass!” We insult, you decide.
After the McHenry debacle, Jordan leaped back in the ring. His Roberto Durán moment had passed. The threats were ratcheted up. Bacon’s wife was inundated with menacing phone calls and texts. “You’re going to be fucking molested!” said one voicemail. More than half a dozen members received death threats – “credible death threats”, said Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. “One thing I cannot stomach, or support, is a bully.”
Robocalls incited Republicans in their districts to call members, falsely claiming they were supporting Jeffries. Representative Carlos A Gimenez personally confronted Jordan. “I told him, ‘I don’t really take well to threats. I really don’t,’” he said. “Robocalls – they’re not free. So somebody is actually funding this. And then he told me that he wasn’t behind it and he’s asked people to stop. But if you’ve asked people to stop it, why aren’t they listening to you?”
Another target, Representative John Rutherford, was skeptical of Jordan’s denial. “I think he’s absolutely responsible for it,” he said.
Jordan’s reliance on threats disclosed his tried and true methods and their shortcoming. Since he has been in the House, he has not enacted a single piece of legislation. His raw rightwing partisanship has been unashamed, unapologetic and undisguised. McCarthy, who was genuinely shocked at the January 6th assault on the Capitol, reduced himself afterward to a beggar in the palace of Trump. Jordan was in the planning meetings of the coup all along. It was the logical trajectory of his political arc from his earliest days.
Jordan entered into the Ohio house in 1995 as the youngest member of the self-described “Caveman Caucus” that warred against moderate Republican governors as though they were socialists. His feud with the Republican speaker John Boehner of his home state, which ultimately resulted in Boehner’s quitting in sheer exasperation, stemmed from Jordan’s contempt. Boehner’s view of him as a “legislative terrorist” was not the result of a newfound discovery about Jordan in Washington, but an insight he had already gained from his antagonism in Ohio. Boehner opposed him when he sought election to the state senate in 2000.
Jordan’s concentrated malice, stripped of the jacket of respectability, has a purity that the older Republicans with their penchant for the occasional compromise and a drink lack. “Politics has never been a place for sissies,” Jordan told an Ohio sports journal more than a decade ago, when he was asked if politics had gotten nastier.
Elected to the House in 2006, he anticipated the Tea Party, which he subsumed as the natural successor to the “Caveman Caucus” but turbocharged with Koch brothers’ money. Jordan’s formation of the Freedom Caucus in 2015 was his new synthesis inside the House of the Tea Party, dark money and intimidation. He was waiting for Trump before Trump ever appeared on the horizon.
After the Republicans won the House in 2022 by a slim margin, Jordan became chairman of the judiciary committee, although, despite graduating from the Capital University Law School of Columbus, Ohio, he curiously never passed the bar or practiced law. He created the Orwellian-named select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government essentially to harass the prosecutions of Donald Trump. When he demanded that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, turn over her evidence in the fake electors case in Georgia, she replied: “A charitable explanation of your correspondence is that you are ignorant of the United States and Georgia constitutions and codes.”
Throughout his entire career Jordan himself has been under a cloud. Before he ever thought of running for the Ohio legislature, he was a star wrestler, recruited by his coach at the University of Wisconsin to be his assistant at the Ohio State University. The team doctor, Richard Strauss, whose locker was next to Jordan’s, near the showers, sexually abused a documented 177 students, according to the school’s official report, and OSU wound up paying more than $60m in settlements to about 300 people in all, while 200 suits are still pending.
Jordan has adamantly denied any knowledge of Strauss’s crimes. Yet one of the wrestlers claimed he pleaded with him not to confirm the stories: “Jim Jordan called me crying, crying … begging me, crying for half an hour. That’s the kind of cover-ups going on here.” If it were to be shown that Jordan had even an inkling of the extraordinary sexual abuse his political career would be ended. “Politics has never been a place for sissies.” But the bully is often the coward.
Before the vote it was known in certain political circles in Washington two major journalistic investigations into Jordan’s role in the wrestling scandal were being conducted. An HBO documentary produced by George Clooney and directed by Eva Orner (my colleague in the Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side) is far along in production. Throughout the speakership balloting a Washington Post story that had been filed as Jordan announced his candidacy was anxiously awaited. That investigation was at last published the day after Jordan dropped out. The Post would report that eight former wrestlers “had clear recollections of team members protesting Strauss’s conduct either directly to Jordan or within Jordan’s range of hearing. All considered it inconceivable that Jordan did not know about Strauss’s disturbing behaviors.”
Jordan’s grasp for the speakership was his bid finally to have it all. He would no longer be a man on the side or behind the curtain. He would walk over the bodies of McCarthy and Steve Scalise to turn the whole House into a giant weaponization subcommittee. But loyalty to him could not deliver the votes. Threats of violence to his adversaries escalated. His strong-arm tactics backfired. The intimidation offended and failed to force submission. Twice defeated, his inability to accept the humiliation he has inflicted on himself compelled him to humiliate himself a third time. He could not win in an open ballot and did strikingly worse in a closed one, losing among Republicans by a margin of 86 to 112. Matt Gaetz screamed to the heavens at Jordan’s martyrdom: “The most popular Republican in Congress was just knifed in an anonymous vote in a secret closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol.”
The difference between the 147 Republicans who voted against certification of Joe Biden’s election on the fateful night of January 6 and those same members who finally voted to reject Jordan is the mathematical measurement of the intimidation factor and its decline.
Jordan’s abysmal failure has left the House Republicans to search for an inoffensive no-name alternative who by definition would lack the influence to move the party beyond its damage – “insurmountable” damage, said the ghost of Kevin McCarthy. “I’m concerned about where we go from here.” Several no-names threw in their hats. McCarthy endorsed the Republican whip, next in line, Tom Emmer. Bannon instantly dubbed him a “Trump hater”, parading his expertise on hatred, and Trump slammed him for not supporting the January 6 coup.
No matter which Republican now accedes to the speakership that minor figure would not be able to maintain the discipline that Jeffries does among Democrats. Only when a majority of the whole House is allowed to bring a bill to the floor will regular order be restored. That would mean that a portion of the Republicans would ally with the Democrats as a majority to move most bills. Until then, the Hastert Rule, imposed by Republicans in the late 1990s, requiring a majority of the majority, in other words, a minority, will continue to serve the interests of extremist factions.
“Politics,” wrote Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents, “is the systematic organization of hatreds.” Within the Republican party, that clever aphorism was turned into a strategy – the southern strategy, using race and resentment to realign the parties, a scheme laid out for the Nixon White House by the brilliant political analyst Kevin Phillips, who died this month.
Jim Jordan rose in the party shaped by Nixon and has gone farther and farther right since, well to the right of the Nixonian or even Reaganite party. What Jordan encountered of the old Republican party, he attempted to extirpate. His constant battle to destroy its remnants was the foundation of his career, antedating Trump by a decade, at last coming close to a central place of power with Trump’s ascent. Jordan’s fight for the speakership is the “systematic organization of hatreds” in a new key. It is a war fought within the Republican party, of Republicans against Republicans, a Hobbesian struggle fit for a champion wrestler, but that has ended with his ferocious movements exhausting him and leaving him pinned to the mat.
The Jordan flop is hardly the last match. It is not a singular or isolated event. The speakership battle is a function of the Trump candidacy. While Trump hurtles to the Republican nomination, campaigning courtroom by courtroom, gag order by gag order, Jordan’s collapse is an augury of an even more broken party to come, of the collision of planets.
Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton
