House of Representatives 5: The Clown Caucus is Throwing Their Toys Out of The Playpen

[GreyhoundFan]

So Qevin is out as speaker, but his temp replacement is one of his closest allies, who is already showing his petty side. Chaos will continue while the toddlers are sort of in charge.

Continued from here:

 

A helpful analysis: "Months of bad blood between McCarthy and Democrats help sink his speakership"

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Kevin McCarthy learned a painful lesson: There’s a price to pay for helping set fire to an institution and then asking the fire department to come save your office.

The California Republican spent nine months as House speaker trying to placate an intractable group of hard-right Republicans, bowing to their demands in ways that hurt the House as an institution. They were never satisfied and turned on McCarthy, setting in motion Tuesday’s vote to expel him as speaker.

By late Monday, after enough Republicans had made their intentions known, it was clear that McCarthy could not win just from votes on his side of the aisle, as is the House tradition. So he turned to Democrats to ask for help putting out the fire of an internal GOP rebellion that he helped start.

It wasn’t even a close call.

“Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy. Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leading liberal, told reporters after a raucous morning caucus.

With that, the always-smiling Republican got expelled from the speaker’s office nine months to the day he lost the first 14 of 15 ballots in trying to win the gavel. After all the concessions McCarthy had made to his right flank to finally win, Democrats could not believe some Republicans were asking them to save McCarthy’s political life.

Some of their voices filled with anger, they said they no longer saw him as the good-natured young Republican who befriended them a decade before in the House gym and planned bipartisan, group bike rides. They viewed him as morphing — fairly quickly over the past three years — into a craven, unprincipled leader just trying to cling to power for the sake of power alone.

Some Democrats pitied him and all his efforts to appease a group of intransigent right-wing radicals. But they said he had to pay a price for making so many promises and backing away from them.

They recalled how, immediately after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, McCarthy blamed President Donald Trump and called for an independent commission to investigate, only to throw his support behind Trump after he left office and to oppose a deep investigation.

“He has brought chaos to the House, and he’s saying keeping him in that position is how we solve that problem? That’s an argument that just isn’t selling,” said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and co-author of a Pentagon policy bill that won the panel’s approval 58-1.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) cited that legislation as a key example of McCarthy’s deceit. Rather than advance such a bill with broad support, he caved to a few hard-right Republicans and loaded the legislation up with culture-war policy riders that passed on a narrow partisan vote.

Jeffries, who has held a cordial public relationship with McCarthy, left no doubt that his party would unanimously support taking the gavel from him, rating McCarthy as no different from the most extreme elements of the GOP.

“Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair,” Jeffries wrote to Democratic lawmakers just minutes before votes started, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

In a rambling news conference late Tuesday, McCarthy blamed Democrats for not giving him some support, suggesting he had been given such assurances late last year.

“I think today was a political decision,” he told reporters, suggesting they hurt the House. “My fear is the institution fell today.”

In fact, when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), McCarthy’s biggest antagonist inside the House GOP, formally offered the motion Monday, he expected Democrats to give McCarthy a political lifeline.

“That’s the likely outcome,” Gaetz told reporters in a news conference.

Instead, Gaetz got to oversee one hour of debate before the final vote, decamping to the Democratic side of the aisle to work at a table usually reserved for leading liberals who despise him.

Democrats did not speak during the debate, leaving the Republicans to fight among themselves. On the final vote, 208 Democrats and eight Republicans voted against McCarthy, with 210 GOP lawmakers supporting him.

McCarthy’s allies had hoped that senior Democrats who care for the institution, particularly Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who served 20 years in leadership and has traveled abroad with McCarthy, would find a way to give him enough support.

First elected in 2006, McCarthy spent his first 12 years in office well liked on both sides of the aisle. He worked out in the House gym with a bipartisan crowd.

Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), a close McCarthy confidant who is now serving as acting speaker, noted that McCarthy tried to treat Jeffries better than then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) treated him the previous four years. He warned that expelling a speaker midterm will be a major “inflection” point.

McCarthy did call Jeffries on Monday evening, but in his news conference, McCarthy said neither leader offered or requested concessions to win votes.

If Democrats were to save him, it would just have been out of the rapport they had with him or for the sake of avoiding throwing the House into the chaos that now consumes it.

Instead, Democrats said that the McCarthy they knew and liked from his days about a decade ago, when he held a junior GOP leadership post, had become unrecognizable compared with the man who gave in to so many hard-right demands.

“I don’t distinguish that sharply between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday.

Raskin, a manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial, noted that McCarthy, in the aftermath of the Capitol attack, was the first high-ranking leader to call for an independent commission to investigate.

But within weeks of the assault, McCarthy traveled to visit Trump and made amends, then worked against a commission and the eventual House Jan. 6 committee.

When he won the speaker’s race in early January, McCarthy did so only by agreeing to weaken the motion that Gaetz used this week against him, making it far easier for a tiny faction to force chaos.

“This speaker and Republican conference have done everything they can to bring us to this point of chaos, to have an unstable House of Representatives,” Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday.

In May, McCarthy clinched a debt-and-budget deal with President Biden that set a framework for federal agency funding for the next two years while also allowing the Treasury Department to continue borrowing.

Within weeks he backed away from that deal when he faced pressure from hard-right Republicans, who contended they had won promises from him that set spending much lower.

Faced with two competing promises, McCarthy went with the GOP lawmakers and ordered the House Appropriations Committee to slash more than $100 billion from the budget. And in September, after publicly promising to hold a vote to launch impeachment proceedings against Biden, he declared on his own that an “impeachment inquiry” was underway, even though his own rank-and-file cast doubt about allegations against the president.

“Kevin McCarthy hasn’t done anything that would be speaker-trustworthy,” Takano said.

Of course, Republicans who voted to oust him Tuesday said they had the same problem: trust.

Over and over, they said, McCarthy would make a commitment to them for some legislation or favor, only to learn that he had some other commitment to another set of Republicans that was in direct conflict.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who holds moderate views on abortion rights, said she thought she had pledges from him to advance bills to expand access to birth control and rape kits, only to see nothing happen because of antiabortion opposition inside the caucus.

“I’ve made deals with Kevin McCarthy, with the speaker, that he has not kept to help women in this country,” she told reporters after the vote.

His actions the past week summed up his time as speaker, leaving so many people feeling burned by McCarthy. After moving hard to the right on government funding bills, he hit the Saturday deadline to force a government shutdown or pass legislation with Democrats.

He had told conservatives for weeks that he wouldn’t pass legislation with Democrats — only to decide to do just that in a last-minute pivot. Conservatives were infuriated.

McCarthy then publicly clashed with Biden over whether he had made a private pledge for legislation to fund military support for Ukraine, leaving all sides of that debate confused about his position.

And on a Sunday show appearance that was shown to the rank-and-file Democrats on Tuesday, the now ex-speaker blamed the near shutdown of the federal government on Democrats.

“We are not saving Kevin McCarthy,” Jayapal said afterward.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why is protecting institutions largely the Democrats’ responsibility?"

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The frustration that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had been trying to keep hidden for months (with varying degrees of success) seeped out on Tuesday evening. At a news conference following his ouster as House speaker, McCarthy attacked those responsible for the defeat, particularly Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who had called for the vote in the first place.

McCarthy also offered more than a little bile to another longtime foe: his political opposition.

“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats,” McCarthy said. “I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution,” he said, pointing, as an example, to the removal of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from committees in the last Congress.

Speaking of the eight Republicans who voted to oust him, McCarthy said: “My fear is the institution fell today, because you can’t do the job if eight people — you have 94 percent or 96 percent of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side. How do you govern?”

He claimed that former speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had promised to stand with him should a motion to vacate the speakership come to a vote. Pelosi wasn’t one of the Democrats who voted to remove him from office — but she didn’t vote at all, being in California since the death of former senator Dianne Feinstein.

This argument from McCarthy got some traction in the immediate aftermath of his ouster. Why wouldn’t Democrats side with the institution and defend the Republican speaker? Weren’t they the ones who liked to preen about being the defenders of democracy and good governance?

But this invites an obvious response: Why, particularly for the past decade or so, has it consistently been up to Democrats to be the line of defense?

McCarthy’s ouster was due in part to his working across the aisle last week to pass legislation funding the government. Gaetz invoked McCarthy’s willingness to pass legislation with Democratic votes as a criticism earlier this week.

One should not labor under the misapprehension that this was common, however. In a letter to his colleagues, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) detailed occasions in which McCarthy had broken agreements or refused consensus. (He also reminded Democrats that Gaetz’s ability to seek McCarthy’s ouster followed a rules change to which McCarthy had agreed.)

Even when it came to Tuesday’s question on whether he should get to serve as speaker McCarthy told his caucus in private and said publicly in an interview on CNBC that he wasn’t going to reach a compromise with Democrats. There was just the expectation — or McCarthy would later claim such an expectation — that the Democrats would side not with him but with tradition and stability. Democrats didn’t call for McCarthy’s removal, but they didn’t keep it from happening, either.

From a practical standpoint, it’s useful to consider the calculus for the minority.

Republicans have a nine-member advantage, something that consistently frustrated McCarthy’s efforts to get things done — particularly given his party’s ostentatious antipathy toward compromise. So issue after issue saw the right-wing fringe of his caucus demanding concessions and not infrequently receiving them. On issue after issue, McCarthy wouldn’t or couldn’t reach an agreement with Democrats.

Whoever replaces him will have similar constraints. Perhaps there were wins McCarthy attained that his successor wouldn’t. But there may be ones his successor can achieve — perhaps thanks to having arrived in power with a broader mandate from the caucus — that McCarthy couldn’t. Or perhaps Democrats might be forgiven for (probably naively!) thinking there could be a speaker who actually tries to build majority support from the whole House instead of just the Republican caucus. What’s the worst a new speaker could do, use falsehoods to launch an impeachment probe targeting President Biden?

Put another way, there is certainly a little room for the next speaker to be worse for Democrats. There is a lot of room for the next speaker to be better.

But now we come back to the bigger issue, the one that colors so much of national politics in the moment. McCarthy watched as the Republican Party shifted toward more and more overt rejections of the institutions of governance. At times, he leveraged that shift. At other times, he stood by tacitly.

For example, there is probably no other Republican who demonstrated the same combination of personal power and silent fealty to Donald Trump. Trump is the embodiment of demands for the dismantling of political norms and power structures, someone whose rise on the right was predicated on his indifference to building consensus or respecting how Congress (or anything else in government) usually worked.

McCarthy’s party gave Trump and his supporters space — and encouragement — to shred Washington and to undercut the functions of democracy. McCarthy voted to reject the electors submitted by states that Biden won in 2020, even after the Capitol riot — even after Trump insulted him in a phone call. He privately suggested that Trump should leave office after the riot but then succumbed to pressure from his caucus and the Republican base. Instead of impeaching Trump, he asked for a probe. When a probe was later put forward he opposed it, because that’s what the base wanted.

He wasn’t alone. The party has repeatedly — and at times obviously sincerely — framed concerns about Trump’s actions or the erosion of democratic values as overblown. It’s a point of contrast for them, framing Democrats as hyperventilating scolds using “democracy” in the way many on the right think they use “racism,” as a dishonest, morality-soaked cudgel.

Indexes of support for open, liberal democracy, though, show that the GOP has measurably shifted away from that ideal. McCarthy’s inability to lead his caucus is in part a function of his base simply rejecting leadership out of hand. Increasing the debt limit is now a partisan issue — as often is funding the government at all. The pressure against these things comes from the right. Keeping things running becomes the Democrats’ responsibility.

And make no mistake: The broad rejection by Republicans of D.C. as tainted, polluted — an idea that McCarthy certainly hasn’t done much to combat — is itself a hostility to government institutions. But it’s one that plays well with the GOP base and, for a long time, didn’t threaten McCarthy’s power.

On one day, on one issue, the Democrats didn’t step up to backstop institutional power: McCarthy’s. Perhaps his successor will make protecting America’s institutional power more of a priority — even though it would require pushing back on the Republican caucus and electoral base.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

She makes several good points:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh yeah, either of these chucklefucks would be a disaster. I doubt Dems will vote for either. "Scalise, Jordan running to replace McCarthy as House speaker"

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In the wake of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s unprecedented ouster as speaker, House Republicans are in uncharted territory Wednesday as they search for a replacement for their colleague from California. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, became the first to publicly share his plans to run, emphatically telling reporters “yes” when asked whether he’d seek to lead the chamber. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority leader, also announced Wednesday he would run for speaker.

McCarthy announced Tuesday night that he would not seek the position again, setting up an expected intraparty battle for the speakership, which is second in line to the presidency. McCarthy’s removal Tuesday, driven by hard-right members of his party, was a step never before taken in the House of Representatives. Besides selecting a new leader, House Republicans must also find consensus for funding the government by mid-November or again risk a shutdown.

Rep. Jim Jordan says he will run for speaker

Asked by reporters Wednesday whether he is running for speaker, Jordan offered a one-word answer: “Yes.”

Jordan was elected to Congress in 2006 and has steadily risen in the ranks of the Republican conference. In January, he became chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and has used that perch to fight those who are investigating former president Donald Trump.

Jordan was one of eight House lawmakers who were part of Trump’s defense team in his first Senate impeachment trial. In one of Trump’s last acts as president, he gave Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian award.

A former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Jordan was first nominated for the speakership in January by hard-right Republicans who opposed McCarthy. At the time, however, Jordan steadfastly maintained his support for McCarthy.

Among those in Jordan’s corner this time around: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who spearheaded the push for McCarthy to be removed from his leadership position.

“My mentor Jim Jordan would be great!” Gaetz posted Tuesday on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to a report that Jordan was entertaining a speaker’s bid.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), an ally of McCarthy’s with ties to the Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and have also expressed support for Jordan.

Rep. Steve Scalise also announces run for speaker

In a statement early Wednesday afternoon, Scalise, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, announced he would seek the speakership.

Scalise, who was critically wounded in 2017 when a gunman opened fire at a GOP practice for the Congressional Baseball Game, described the Republican conference as a family “who saved my life on that field.”

“Now, more than ever, we must mend the deep wounds that exist within our Conference,” Scalise wrote. “I have a proven track record of bringing together the diverse array of viewpoints within our Conference to build consensus where others thought it impossible.”

The Louisianian was first sworn into Congress in 2008 after campaigning as a voice of the South and red-state Republicans more broadly. He went on to chair the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of the most conservative House members.

Scalise might, however, struggle to gain the support of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. While Scalise is more conservative than McCarthy, the group sees him as part of the “establishment” and entrenched in GOP leadership.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) expressed support for Scalise on Tuesday, several news outlets reported — noteworthy because Emmer has also been considered a shortlist candidate.

Speaker hopefuls making pitches to Texas delegation

Several Republicans interested in running for speaker pitched members of the sizable Texas House Republican delegation Wednesday morning.

Among those attending: Scalise, Jordan and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.).

Hern, who has been in Congress since 2018, told reporters that his business experience — he had operated 18 McDonald’s franchises in addition to other ventures — meant he could bring a different approach to the job.

“Thinking about a different face, somebody who’s got different experiences than probably everyone else [who] is going to announce. And we’re going to speak to that and see how that resonates with the folks,” he said.

Biden weighs in on McCarthy ouster

President Biden offered his take on McCarthy’s ouster, saying that “more than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Biden also emphasized that the federal government has “a lot of work to do” to reach a spending agreement. Last weekend, Congress passed a bipartisan measure to fund the government, but only through mid-November.

“We have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies. We need to talk to one another,” he said.

The president added that he was “grateful” to all parties, including McCarthy — whom he referred to as the former speaker — for their work in negotiations to keep the government open.

McConnell offers a bit of advice

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters on Wednesday that the next House speaker should get rid of the motion to vacate rule, which triggered McCarthy’s ouster.

“I have no advice to give to House Republicans, except one: I hope whoever the next speaker is, gets rid of the motion to vacate,” McConnell said. “I think it makes the speaker’s job impossible, and the American people expect us to have a functioning government.”

McConnell began his news conference Wednesday by thanking McCarthy “for his service” and noted that he and the California Republican “had a great personal relationship.”

“I think he has much to be proud of, he avoided a government shutdown, did the inevitable with regard to the debt ceiling,” McConnell said. “I’m one person who is extremely grateful for his service.”

Trump waves off talk of becoming speaker

As former president Donald Trump arrived for the third day of his civil fraud trial in New York on Wednesday, he waved off talk about becoming speaker himself, saying he was focused on his presidential reelection bid.

“A lot of people have been calling me about speaker,” Trump told reporters before entering a courtroom. “All I can say is, we’ll do whatever is best for the country and for the Republican Party.”

Asked whether he would take the job, Trump did not rule it out but again emphasized that he wanted to be president.

“If I can help them through the process, I would do it, but we have some great people in the Republican Party who could do a great job as speaker,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it is to help, but my focus — my total focus — is being president.”

Mondaire Jones walks back post on McCarthy

Former congressman Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) is walking back comments he made on social media, after what he said was interpreted by some as antisemitic.

After McCarthy lost his bid on Tuesday to remain House speaker, Jones shared an image of McCarthy meeting with Hasidic leaders in New York alongside Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.). Jones is seeking Lawler’s congressional seat.

“Well this was a waste of everyone’s time,” Jones posted on Tuesday on X, formerly known as Twitter, alongside the image of the meeting.

Jones later said the post “was too open to misinterpretation.”

“My point was to communicate that Kevin McCarthy, and by extension Michael Lawler, cannot possibly deliver for communities in Rockland because he’s no longer Speaker. Regrettably, I did not make this point clear enough, and so I have deleted the tweet,” Jones wrote on Wednesday, adding that he’s “a strong ally of our diverse Jewish communities.”

 

[Ozlsn]

So if they cannot come to agreement on a Speaker then what? Is there a dissolution trigger? Because if they can't pass bills and the govt shuts down then they can't keep at this until Nov next year, it's ridiculous. 

Can they lock the Congress in until they come to a choice? 

[GreyhoundFan]

Pretty sad:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Scary stuff:

Here’s one of them being called out on her hypocrisy:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I love that Rep Moskowitz has done this:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Too funny. I love the crying baby sound effects.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, ya think?

 

[Ozlsn]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I love that Rep Moskowitz has done this:

 

So I've been wondering about this. How does the assessment for local tax work? Can Trump report his value and then they tax on that? Do they have independent assessors working for local govt? Because you would think if that's what he's been assessed as and taxed on then that is about what it's currently worth.

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

Bye, Felicia

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a helpful thread:

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[CTRLZero]

12 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is a helpful thread:

 

Thanks, it’s a more complicated process than I realized.  I wonder how it will play out.

In point #12, why are these folks not voting on the floor?  Thinking a bit more…because they represent territories I suppose.  

[Ozlsn]

8 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

Thanks, it’s a more complicated process than I realized.  I wonder how it will play out.

In point #12, why are these folks not voting on the floor?  Thinking a bit more…because they represent territories I suppose.  

If they're elected to Congress as representatives though they should get a floor vote - territory or not. I find this whole thing very confusing!

[GreyhoundFan]

Hakeem is an actual leader.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Jim Jordan-ization of the GOP"

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has emerged as a strong contender to become the next speaker of the House, particularly after former president Donald Trump endorsed him Friday. But as Jordan’s name was rising to the top on Thursday, an unintentionally potent reminder of the uneasy choice facing the GOP emerged.

“I want to tell you something that I think is really important,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), an ally of ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), said on CNN. Graves went on to cite “the number of members of Congress that said that the Jim Jordan of 2010 or 2020 is a night-and-day difference to the Jim Jordan of 2023. And there’s been a lot of change and, I guess, maturity in the way that he’s approached things.”

The speaker of the House could soon be a 59-year-old man who is at least a lot more mature than when he was at 56.

That’s an ungenerous summary; Graves was obviously trying to suggest that a founding member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus has charted a more pragmatic political course within the GOP conference over the last few years. And thus, Jordan could seemingly win over McCarthy’s more institutionalist allies as he seeks the speakership, where his top competition for now is House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.).

But make no mistake: Whatever institutionalization and maturation Jordan has undergone, the Jim Jordan of 2010 and 2020 looms. Plenty about his conduct today indicates that the Freedom Caucus bomb-thrower still resides within him and could drive the GOP even further to the right.

The fact that Jordan is a viable option appears to be less about his own evolution than the Republican Party’s.

That’s something that Jordan himself has pointed to, while acknowledging he has learned to play nicer with GOP colleagues. His office cited recent comments in which Jordan said, “I’m the same guy I always was.”

“I was fighting for the same things 10 to 12 years ago that I’m fighting for now,” he said last week on Fox News, when asked whether he had changed.

He added: “What I have really figured out is, if we don’t come together, I don’t know how you stop where the left wants to go.”

For much of the 2010s, Jordan was a key leader of GOP efforts to push the government toward shutdowns while holding out for concessions. That was the case in 2013 when it was about defunding Obamacare, in 2015 when it was about Planned Parenthood funding, and in 2018 when it was about the border wall.

In the last instance, Jordan was more intent even than fellow members of the Freedom Caucus to force the issue. The result was the longest shutdown in history.

“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together,” former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) wrote in his 2021 book, which lumped his Ohio colleague in with other “legislative terrorists.”

All that is relevant given that the next speaker would be thrust into an imminent shutdown debate, with the next deadline mid-November, according to the deal McCarthy cut. Republicans will be asking themselves whether the guy who pushed them down that path so many times before is the man to lead them this time.

Jordan was in the minority of House Republicans who opposed McCarthy’s deal.. He said Friday in another Fox interview that Republicans should push a sequester-like idea — forcing a 1 percent cut to the budget if Congress keeps passing stopgap measures to fund the government.

“So we need that threat hanging there to be leveraged for us to get the policies you just talked about,” he said, mentioning GOP priorities on border security, crime and inflation.

But shutdowns aren’t the only area in which Jordan has been to the right of his colleagues and held a hard line.

When Republicans in 2017 were pushing for a package to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Jordan initially dismissed it as “Obamacare Lite” before ultimately supporting an amended version.

By 2018, Jordan was challenging McCarthy for minority leader, earning 43 out of 202 votes within the GOP conference. Afterward, many Republicans fretted about him becoming the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and he was passed over even though Trump supported him.

(Jordan instead got the top GOP slot on the less prestigious Oversight Committee, before getting the Judiciary position in 2020. He’s now chairman of the Judiciary Committee.)

As that suggests, Jordan has aligned himself with Trump in ways that even many of his fellow Republicans have been reluctant to:

• He spearheaded an effort to impeach then-Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversaw the Russia investigation.
• He was among about two dozen Republicans who in 2019 during a Trump impeachment deposition stormed a secure room. The move delayed proceedings for five hours, sparking cybersecurity concerns and drawing Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to initially label the participants “nuts.” (Graham later backed off his comment.)
• Jordan played a lead role in the House in Trump’s quest to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Jordan said in early December 2020, “I don’t know how you can ever convince me that President Trump didn’t actually win this thing based on all the things you see.”

Jordan’s efforts ultimately led Trump to award him a post-Jan. 6 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor and one usually reserved for historically significant figures.

But Jordan hardly shed this approach after the calendar turned to 2021. Of late, he has spun a series of conspiracy theories about Justice Department politicization and purported targeting of Trump. That includes claims that are baseless, false and contradicted by other witnesses — about Hunter Biden, his laptop, President Biden’s potential impeachment and other claims floated by the House GOP’s “weaponization” subcommittee, which Jordan leads (and has given even some GOP members heartburn).

Last year, Jordan called a report that a 10-year-old rape victim had become pregnant a “lie,” before the alleged rapist was arrested. (Jordan deleted the tweet. The man later pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence.)

And that’s to say nothing of the personal questions. Those include his interactions with Trump on and around Jan. 6, about which Jordan has been uncharacteristically cagey and awkward, while defying a Jan. 6 committee subpoena. They also include a sexual abuse scandal involving a team doctor that overlapped with his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. Jordan has never been implicated in the abuse, but multiple wrestlers have claimed Jordan knew or must have known about it.

A 2019 report didn’t mention Jordan by name but said it couldn’t reach “conclusive determinations” about whether coaches were aware of such complaints. In 2020, a former Ohio State wrestler testified that Jordan had pleaded with him during a 2018 phone call not to corroborate the allegations against the doctor, Richard Strauss. Jordan’s office called the claim a “lie” and said, “Congressman Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”

Jordan’s conduct over just the past two years might have given the party pause even during the Trump administration. But the party has suddenly chosen simply to embrace this Trumpian approach rather than keep it at arm’s length, whether it’s Trump’s “stolen election” talk or Jordan’s “weaponization” efforts.

While Republicans have occasionally bristled at House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R-Ky.) handling of its various investigations, including the initial impeachment inquiry hearing two weeks ago, Jordan has proven a much more adept communicator in pushing the party line.

And whatever change in political strategy he may have undertaken, much of this is about the GOP itself warming to his bare-knuckles style of politics.

It’s anyone’s guess who might be elected speaker this week with a narrow GOP majority. But against that backdrop, choosing Jim Jordan makes complete sense.