House Speaker Jim Jordan

The perfect choice

Jim Jordan will be the next House Speaker. There was never much doubt about that, and the little doubt there was about the speaker race dissolved when President Trump posted this on Truth Social:

With endorsements from Trump, Mark Levin, and congressmen ranging from the most conservative members to former Democrat congressman Jeff Van Drew, it's as sure as sure bet can get.

I endorse Jordan also. McCarthy was a fine conservative Speaker — I didn’t support Representative Gaetz’s vendetta against him — but I had doubts that he would continue to be a fine conservative Speaker over time, because his voting record, over time, is of a moderate.

As I pointed out here here, “[A]ccording to the American Conservative Union (ACU), which rates lawmakers’ conservatism based on how he or she votes, McCarthy is the most liberal Republican Speaker since the ACU’s founding in 1964.”

Jim Jordan is different. Like McCarthy, Jordan emerged from his first year in Congress with a CPAC rating of 100. Unlike McCarthy however, Jordan maintained his perfect rating to this day, while McCarthy's rating dipped to as low as 72, as one can tell from the illustrative comparison of the two below:

CPAC ratings can be taken with a grain of salt, but in this case it is an useful measure of Jordan’s steady commitment to conservatism.

Unsurprisingly, Jordan has been attacked since his elevation to Speaker became unofficially official. Corrupt former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, still stinging from Jordan exposing her lie that the 2015 Benghazi riot was the result of some YouTube video, called him “one of the principal ringleaders of the circus that’s been created in the Republican Party for the last several years.”

Odious former Representative Liz Cheney added that if Jordan became Speaker, “there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”

Yet self-described liberal writer Michael Shellenberger dismisses Cheney’s warning. He argues on his Substack that “no member of Congress has done more over the last year to expose the abuses of power by the federal government agencies, including in demanding greater censorship of disfavored views, than Jordan.”

If Jordan needs a model of effective speakership he needs look no further than former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Although the House Democrats are typically uniformly progressive, despite how conservative some may claim to be on the campaign trail, she did still impressively manage to make even the rebels toe the line.

A few years ago, for example, there were numerous stories about friction between Pelosi and freshman congresswomen nicknamed “The Squad.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), for example, the leader of the Squad, who also represents the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), argued that “we need new leadership in the Democratic Party.”

Yet recently AOC has broken with the DSA and much of her base, which is fervently anti-military, by voting to provide aid to support Ukraine’s ongoing resistance to the Russian invasion.

This has not gone unnoticed. According to the World Socialist Web Site, “It is becoming increasingly obvious that Ocasio-Cortez’s role in Congress has not been to translate left-wing opposition into ‘internal change,’ it has been to suffocate ‘outside energy’ and ‘translate’ it into support for the Democratic Party and facilitate its right-wing policies.”

This tweet from commentator Glenn Greenwald further demonstrates how much AOC has changed:

Her selling out may be due to her future political ambitions. She may see herself as House Speaker or as a senator. But the bottom line is Pelosi broke AOC and her Squad in a way McCarthy never could with Gaetz.

Jordan hopefully won’t need to break any House Republicans but keeping his colleagues happy will be a challenge. The Republicans are much more ideologically diverse than the Democrats. One of the people who voted against McCarthy, for example, was Rep. Nancy Mace, who did so because McCarthy “had failed to bring up votes he had promised related to abortion and birth control access.” Furthermore, it still only takes one disgruntled representative to file a motion to vacate the chair, or remove the Speaker, as we just saw.

It will take a conservative representative with powerful allies in and out of government to survive as Speaker of the House. Jordan has admirers among his congressional colleagues, in the media, in all conservative corners, and even in some liberal circles. He is the perfect choice for the job.

—DK