With the speakership of the House at stake, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is struggling to assemble the votes he needs to ascend to the chamber’s top job. So Jordan’s allies have mounted a pressure campaign to convince recalcitrant House Republicans — who have good reason to worry that Jordan becoming speaker would be a catastrophe for both their party and the country — to get on board.
That campaign has featured endorsements by Donald Trump and recently defenestrated speaker Kevin McCarthy, right-wing social media accounts posting the phone numbers of wavering members so they can be flooded with calls, and most strikingly, the seeming intervention of Sean Hannity.
The very idea of Jordan carefully assembling votes to pass a difficult bill is farcical.
A producer for the Fox News host has been texting members not yet committed to support Jordan with a message that has all the subtlety of a horse’s head in their bed. “Hannity would like to know,” the message reads, “why during a war breaking out between Israel and Hamas, with the war in Ukraine, with the wide open borders, with a budget that’s unfinished why would Rep xxxx be against Rep Jim Jordan for speaker? Please let us know when Rep xxxx plans on opening The People’s House so work can be done.”
There’s no doubt that a Jordan speakership would be good for Fox News, which relies on outrage and conflict to feed its viewers. And few deliver those things with as much shouty arm-waving as Jordan, which is why he is such a ubiquitous presence on the network. In the last six years, Jordan has made over 500 appearances on Fox, including more than 150 on Hannity’s program.
A Jordan speakership would offer a new level of media-political synergy to the right; what it wouldn’t offer is the hope of anything less than chaos in the House itself. That includes the possibility of a government shutdown, which will happen in mid-November unless Congress passes a new funding bill.
Is Jim Jordan the man to engineer that kind of rescue? Can he herd his unruly caucus toward a compromise solution that puts the country’s needs over short-term partisan advantage?
To answer those questions, consider that the speaker’s complex job requires a variety of skills. There’s an old saying that Congress has two types of members — work horses and show horses. Speakers usually come from the ranks of the former, working their way up through the leadership as they learn the delicate arts of handholding, vote counting, and the delicate balance of rewards and punishments to a collection of oversized egos.
Which is why Jordan’s bid for the speakership is preposterous. He’s the ultimate show horse. He has never served in the House leadership. The very idea of him carefully assembling votes to pass a difficult bill is farcical. In 16 years in Congress, he has been the primary sponsor of just a few dozen bills. Aside from a pair expressing “the sense of the House” and one establishing the absurd Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the number of Jordan-sponsored bills that became law is precisely zero.
The closest comparison to a Jordan speakership would be that of Newt Gingrich.
Jordan has other glaring issues, including the accusation he turned a blind eye to abuse as a college wrestling coach, and his deep involvement in plotting with Trump to overturn the 2020 election. In a rational political party, either would have instantly disqualified him. But the biggest problem with imagining Jordan as speaker is that he is one of the primary avatars of the contemporary Republican political style: eager to kneecap government, allergic to any hint of compromise, committed to conflict for its own sake and happy to create crisis after crisis.
In recent years the dynamic between Republican speakers and the people Jordan represents has been one that toggles between uneasy alliance and outright hostility, with the far right creating disorder and the speaker eventually pulling back when things go too far, often by joining with Democrats to end or prevent a shutdown or debt default. That’s what McCarthy did last month, and it cost him the speakership. He and other recent Republican speakers — Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert — were plenty conservative, but they also had a limit to the amount of chaos they were willing to tolerate. There’s little reason to think Jordan has such a limit. In that way, the closest comparison to a Jordan speakership would be that of Newt Gingrich, whose speaker tenure from 1995 to 1999 was disastrous for both the Republican Party and the country. Gingrich had grandiose visions but struggled mightily in running the House. He engineered multiple government shutdowns, impeached Bill Clinton over an extramarital affair (while having an extramarital affair of his own), oversaw a disastrous midterm election, and perhaps most important of all, injected a new kind of poisonous, no-holds-barred partisanship into American politics. Gingrich was the progenitor of the kind of politics Jim Jordan embodies, and which most of the Republican Party has adopted as its own. But Jordan is still a long way from the 217 votes he needs to become speaker; in the internal Republican vote to nominate a candidate Friday, Jordan received only 124 votes against Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia, who had entered the race only hours earlier. In a second “validation vote,” asking members how many Republicans would vote for him on the floor, 55 still voted no. Some have since come around, but if Jordan loses only five votes when the full House votes on Tuesday, he fails. But Jordan’s supporters, in Congress and on the air, are not giving up. Maybe if he loses the floor vote, they’ll storm the Capitol. It would be only fitting.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
