Jim Jordan Must Not Become Speaker

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, October 20, 2023

 

There are certain moments in our politics at which it is important to achieve a certain outcome simply to prevent a bad precedent from being set. This is one of them. I have heard all of the substantive arguments for and against Jim Jordan being elected as speaker of the House, but, in truth, I don’t especially care about them either way. Neither do I care about the possibility that the incentives will line up in such a way as to ensure that, politically, Jordan is guaranteed to “win” either way. Rather, I care about preventing this pointless chaos from happening again — or, at least, about raising its cost — and I think that, in order for that prevention or cost-raising to occur, Jim Jordan has to lose.

 

The situation in which the Republican caucus now finds itself is absurd. Eight people removed Speaker McCarthy. Eight. Jim Jordan has now been short by 20, 22, and 25 votes. And yet, to listen to those who are demanding that Jordan prevail, you would think it were the other way around. Why is this? I’ll tell you: Because, as all their ridiculously dishonest talk about the supposed “will of the people” has made clear, those who covet a Jim Jordan speakership think that they are more important than everyone else. Why does the claim that it is imperative to have a speaker at this moment in history not apply to Kevin McCarthy or to Steve Scalise? How can it be a disgrace that the GOP won’t install a man who has the support of all but 20 members of the conference, but perfectly fine that the GOP won’t install a man who has the support of all but 8? Why, despite polls that show that Republicans oppose the removal of Kevin McCarthy, do Jordan’s allies seem so convinced that the one thing in the entire world that the median Republican voter desires is the arrival of of Speaker Jim Jordan? The answer is simple: Because, in the view of the Matt Gaetzes of the world, some people’s votes count for more than others, and this renders the traditional math a mere abstraction.

 

What we are seeing play out in this debacle is, I’m afraid, all too representative of the GOP’s broader political problem at present. In an ideal world, I, too, would have preferred someone other than Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In an ideal world, I would prefer the Republican Party to have done better in the elections of 2022. In an ideal world, I would prefer our public policy to be more conservative than it is. But we don’t live in that ideal world, and that I wish we did is completely irrelevant. The core problem that the GOP has right now is that it simply does not enjoy as much power as it desires. The president is a Democrat. The Senate is run by Democrats. The Republicans run the House, but their majority is small, and it is only possible because a good number of moderates won close races last November. Removing Kevin McCarthy has not changed that. Over the last few days, I have talked to quite a few Jim Jordan stalwarts, and I have detected in them the same flaw as I detect in the Trump dead-enders: namely, a catastrophic failure of imagination about how the many people who do not belong to their clique actually see the world. Like it or not, the twelve people who preferred McCarthy to Jim Jordan get to vote, too.

 

Which is why, at this point, I think it is imperative that Jim Jordan lose over and over and over again, and that the people who orchestrated this mess learn their lesson. It is not acceptable for a tiny minority of the GOP’s conference to remove the speaker, smother the nomination of the next-most-popular option, and then attempt to bludgeon, cajole, and bully the holdouts into supporting a third-string option who has far less support than the guy who was dislodged. A key part of conservatism is making sure that people face the consequences of their actions. To reward the architects of this shambles by agreeing to the outcome that they prefer would be a monumental mistake. So, too, would be allowing them to appeal to values such as “urgency,” “loyalty,” or the “will of the majority” that, until Jim Jordan was on the ballot, they rejected in their entirety. The answer to this ruse must be no, no, no — or we’ll be back in this exact position before you can say “TV camera.”