Jim Jordan’s Speakership Bid Collapses, Democracy Dodges a Bullet

This week saw MAGA Republicans engage in extremist arm-wrestling in the House speaker race and the sins of the 2020 election subversion scheme begin to catch up with Donald Trump’s closest allies. On this week’s episode of the Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to newly minted MacArthur genius grant recipient Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy to take a look at the stakes of this moment for American democracy. Protect Democracy’s work focuses on the technical ways the law can be applied to protect election workers and inhibit disinformation while also addressing the big constitutional and cultural questions we must answer if we’re going to reject authoritarianism. Their discussion of the utter mayhem unfolding around the House speaker contest, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I’m just going to turn to the Chaos Muppets for a minute. You know, one of the things that we are looking at this week is whatever it is that is happening in the speaker’s race.

I’m going to confess to you that a law professor friend sent me an email that chilled me to the bone this week, suggesting that if Jim Jordan won the speakership, he would simply never certify a Biden election win.

But I wonder if you could just help me understand what it means to have a nonfunctioning House of Representatives at this moment, what power is the speaker of the House going to have in the 2024 election, and whether the reforms you all made to the Electoral Count Reform Act can somehow sort of hedge against the absolute catastrophe we’ve seen unfolding for the last two weeks in the House?

Ian Bassin: Let’s go from darkness to light. I’m going to agree with the law professor friend of yours. In advance of the 2020 election, one of my colleagues, Erica Newland, a brilliant attorney who served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, was tasked by our team to dig into what were all of the mechanisms by which Congress could subvert the election results, and what were all the mechanisms by which those in Congress who were committed to their oaths of office and upholding our constitutional order could try to prevent the body from doing that. And after doing that research, after the inauguration, Erica commented on an internal call to our team that it occurred to her, as she dug into it, that if the current iteration of the Republican Party is in control of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there is no way that they will certify a win if it turns out that a Democrat is legitimately elected in the 2024 election.

So let that sink in. I still believe that that is the most likely outcome if the current Republican Party is in control of one or both of the houses of Congress. Now recall that the Congress that presides over the counting of Electoral College ballots is the new Congress that is elected in 2024. So whatever Congress is elected in 2024 will be seated on Jan. 3, 2025, and then will oversee the counting of Electoral College ballots on Jan. 6, 2025. So it’s not the current Congress. It’s the new one.

But all we have seen from the Republican Party over the last six years is that they are moving further and further and further in the direction of being entirely MAGA-fied or Trumpified. So, if they prevail in the 2024 election, it seems likely that that Congress will be even more Trumpified than the one that is sitting now, which is kind of hard to believe. That’s the dark part of it.

The light part of it is that as much as it is terrifying, and should be, that 200-plus members of the Republican caucus voted to make Jim Jordan, Donald Trump’s key lieutenant in the Congress, the speaker, as of the moment that we are recording this, that has been thwarted. A handful of GOP members in the House have stood firm and blocked Jim Jordan from being speaker. And it looks like we may end up with, essentially, is some form of compromise. …

And I think if that holds, and that’s a big if, this is one of the most important developments in this country over the last seven-plus years. And here’s why. I’m going to invoke another recent story in the news that I think is really important to pay attention to, which is the elections this past week in Poland. So, in Poland this past week, a coalition that ran from the center-right to the left united and pulled off a stunning upset of the illiberal nationalist and ever more authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice party, which has governed Poland for the better part of the last decade or so.

Why is that important? Because history teaches that the way to defeat authoritarian movements is to form a very broad pro-democracy coalition of people who typically disagree about policy and politics. This is why I talked about how our strategy at Protect Democracy is to build a broad coalition of pro-democracy progressives, moderates, and conservatives.

Let’s go back to the interwar period in Europe. During that time, there were far-right, extremist, authoritarian movements rising across the continent. In some countries, Belgium and Finland in particular, the mainstream center-right parties saw those extremists for what they were, as threats to the system, and they held their noses and formed a united coalition with their traditional opponents on the left to block those extremists from power.

In Italy and Germany, the mainstream center-right parties made a different calculation. They gambled that they could ride the energy of the far-right extremists to power, and sideline the leaders of those far-right movements. We know how tragically that gamble turned out. For most of the last six years, the American Republican Party, by and large, has chosen the German and Italian path.

If they continue to do that, I think we can expect similarly tragic results. But what we may be witnessing in the House this week is the first potential signs that they might choose the Belgian, Finnish, and Polish path, or at least enough of them. Now, I’m not naïve enough to be super optimistic about that just yet, because the Republican Party of late has not given me enough confidence to be super optimistic about that. But I continue to push for it, and I think we all need to continue to push for it, because I think it is the single most important thing we could do to save democracy in the United States. So I am cautiously optimistic that if, in fact, Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry does gain some degree of ongoing power to be speaker on the backs of some form of coalition, that may be one of the most positive signs we’ve seen in the last seven years that the United States will survive this moment.