Rep. Jim Jordan just got even worse news, and it’s a lot for him to wrestle with
Last night Jim Jordan’s allies told the media that they expected him to lose votes in today’s second round of voting for Speaker. It was pretty clear they were trying to get out ahead of what they thought would be bad news. Sure enough, 22 House Republicans voted against Jordan today, even worse than the 20 House Republicans who voted against him yesterday.
Jordan now says he’ll continue fighting for the speakership into a third round. This could still potentially go either way. We saw Kevin McCarthy lose fourteen rounds before his opposition simply seemed to get tired and caved during the fifteenth round. But it’s certainly not looking good for Jordan. And there’s one thing Jordan has to wrestle with here: a lot of people, even on his own side, simply hate him.
Look at the cross section of House Republicans who are voting against Jim Jordan. Some of them are as far to the right as he is. Some of them represent moderate districts. Some of them are big names. Some of them are nobodies. They don’t appear to be an actual coalition. They’re just a batch of House Republicans who each hate Jim Jordan so much, they’re not letting him even come close to being Speaker.
None of these House Republicans voting against Jim Jordan are good people. None of them are doing it for the right reasons. So we don’t know what they’ll do in round three, or if it gets to it, round ten. But wow it must suck to be Jim Jordan today. With no other Republican candidates on the horizon, House Republicans are at a point where they basically have to choose between Jordan and nobody. And they’ve now chosen “nobody” twice in a row.
