It’s not just Jim Jordan who’s getting his ass kicked right now
Joe Biden was in Israel on Wednesday, carrying out his role as the President of the United States and the leader of the free world. In any normal time, it would have been the only political story. But these are far from normal times, and so in the midst of Biden’s crucial trip, a reporter felt compelled to ask him what he thought about Jim Jordan. Biden wisely responded with a playful non-answer.
Jim Jordan? Really? The world is on fire, in some cases literally, and the leader of the free world is getting questions about Jim Jordan? That peon? Do you know how badly someone like Jim Jordan has to screw up to be a conversational topic during the U.S. President’s visit to a U.S. ally during a war?
And yet Jim Jordan really did screw up that badly. The reporter was not wrong to ask President Biden what he thought about the Republican House’s increasingly disastrous attempt at finding a Speaker. It’s been a farce from the start – dating back to those fifteen consecutive votes in January – but over the past two weeks it’s turned into a series of over the top headlines worthy of the Onion.
Jim Jordan failed to win the first round of voting simply because he was being such an abrasive jerk about it, and so he tried to be an even more abrasive jerk about it, and then predictably lost the second round by an even worse margin. Then he ramped up Jim Jordan-ness to such a cartoonish level that his supporters began sending death threats to other House Republicans, and now Jordan can’t seem to figure out why he’s on track to lose tomorrow’s third round of voting by an even bigger margin. Forget the Onion, this is reaching a Monty Python level of a defeated opponent who doesn’t know when to give up.
And yet who knows? There’s still theoretically some chance that Jim Jordan will still become Speaker of the House. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe on the fifteenth round. That did the trick last time. Maybe Jordan could try getting Donald Trump’s endorsement for Speaker. Oh wait, he already has that, and he’s still coming up way short? Remember all the people on TV who told us Trump had an “ironclad grip” on this Republican House? That’s never been the case at any point in 2023, but here we are anyway.
Of course someone has to be Speaker of the House. If Jim Jordan ends up failing (or gets dragged off stage by his fellow Republicans with one of those giant hooks like they use in the Muppet movies), then maybe they’ll end up giving more powers to “interim Speaker” Patrick McHenry. He’s mostly worthless but his name kind of sounds like he could have been a founding father or something, so there’s that. And he’s not Jim Jordan, which at this point may be the worst faint praise in all of politics.
I’ll tell you this much though. Wherever this goes from here, House Republicans have already done tangible and lasting damage to themselves during this process – that is, if we make a point of putting it to use. I talk a lot about the fourteen House Republicans running for reelection in toss-up races. Several of them voted for Jim Jordan on one or both ballots. So guess what we’ll now be using against those House Republicans? Their moderate districts hate extremist clowns like Jordan. So they sure stepped in it by voting for him. And now they’ve given us free political ammunition for the 2024 election.
So thanks, I guess, House Republicans, for being so stupid. You see the real problem with Kevin McCarthy is that while he was perfectly willing to prop up and enable the most corrupt extremists in his party, it was difficult to get any of it to stick to McCarthy directly. After all, he was an affable doofus with a smile that made you think “he can’t be that evil” unless you know for a fact that he is indeed that evil. But when Republicans in the moderate House districts are marrying themselves to someone as scandal-plagued and easily identifiable as an extremist as Jim Jordan, hoo boy. I’m already making spreadsheets about how we can use this vote to help us flip the House in 2024. If the House Republicans are going to be this awful, at least they’re now making it easier for us.
