Jim Jordan’s Speaker Candidacy Is Neither Dead Nor Alive

Update, Oct. 19, 12:15 p.m.: According to multiple reports including the Washington Post’s, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan is pausing his effort to become speaker of the House and will support a plan to expand the authority of interim speaker Patrick McHenry and extend his tenure through January.

Original post, Oct. 18, 5:50 p.m.: On Monday, Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan appeared close to becoming speaker of the House. But on Tuesday, only 200 members of his 221-member party caucus voted for his candidacy on the House floor. It was more than twice as many no votes as he’d reportedly expected, and it left him 17 votes shy of the 217 he needs. (One of Jordan’s supporters was unable to attend Tuesday’s vote but has since returned to the Hill.) On Wednesday, he came back for another vote, and … 22 members of his party voted against his candidacy, leaving him 18 votes short, which is more than 17.

The group of Republicans voting against Jordan, a major supporter of former President Donald Trump who was active in the efforts to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021, includes both vulnerable “front-line” members from swing districts and safer veteran members who have roles on the Appropriations Committee. The latter legislators have long seen their efforts to pass budget bills interrupted by right-wing agitators in the Freedom Caucus, and they’re not keen to see Jordan, one of the Freedom Caucus’ founding leaders, benefit from the deposing of former Speaker and California Rep. Kevin McCarthy by other hard-liners.

The day did introduce a new subplot: behind-the-scenes discussion of a proposal by Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce to extend the tenure, and expand the powers, of temporary Speaker and North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry. (Specifically, Joyce’s plan would make McHenry speaker until January.) As we discussed on Tuesday, while McHenry is a true-blue (true-red?) conservative, he’s also seen by moderate Republicans and Democrats as someone who would be responsible enough to run the chamber without engaging in the kinds of disruptive stunts that Jordan has specialized in. It’s within the realm of possibility that Republicans could agree to give the job to McHenry for the next few months (or that enough Democrats would support a motion to elevate him that it could pass even if hard-line right-wing Republicans opposed it).

While Joyce is circulating this plan, though, it hasn’t actually gotten put up for a vote. That’s likely because any Republican who voted for McHenry right now would be perceived by his or her colleagues as undermining Jordan while his candidacy is still nominally alive.

And it is! Nominally! Jordan still says he’s hoping to become speaker. But none of the members who voted against him have given reporters an indication, on or off the record, that they might change their votes. (One of Jordan’s supporters told Bloomberg that Jordan had tried to win the votes of several members of the New York delegation by offering to support an increase in the amount of the state and local deduction that individuals can take on their federal taxes but that his offer was rejected.) Jordan hasn’t called for a third round of floor balloting on his candidacy, and a closed-door meeting of Republican representatives for which a room in the Capitol had been blocked off didn’t take place, leading to an avant-garde NBC News update, titled “House Republicans aren’t meeting,” about the … news? …. of a not-meeting:

Per an official announcement, voting in the House on Thursday will begin “no earlier than 12:00 p.m.” The lower chamber of Congress has adopted the schedule of a teenager whose parents are about to make him get a summer job.