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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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.
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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.)
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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).
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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.”
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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.
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