WASHINGTON — After failing to win the speaker’s gavel in a House floor vote for the third time, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Friday asked his GOP colleagues if he should keep trying.
Voting by secret ballot in the Capitol basement, Republicans told Jordan no by a vote of 112 to 86. And that was that.
“Rep. Jordan stated before the vote that he would accept the will of the conference and so he was gracious, as we expected him to be, in accepting the results,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) told reporters.
Admitting defeat is not easy for Jordan. His speaker bid failed by increasingly wide margins across the three House votes this week, but he was poised to keep trying, with his allies at one point suggesting a marathon of votes designed to break the will of his opponents over the course of the weekend.
And Jordan has never acknowledged that his preferred candidate for president in 2020, Donald Trump, lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes.
On Friday morning, a reporter asked Jordan if the 2020 election had been stolen. There is no evidence that fraud or irregularities swayed the result — a finding reaffirmed by forensic audits and court case after court case at the time — but Jordan said otherwise.
“I think there were all kinds of problems with the 2020 election,” he said.
The refusal to accept Trump’s defeat helps explain Republicans’ predicament in the House of Representatives, which has had no speaker for the past 18 days thanks to a far-right faction that operates as if Democrats have no rightful role in governance.
Without a speaker, the House can’t even pass a symbolic resolution, much less consider legislation to keep the government open or send aid to Israel, Ukraine or the U.S.-Mexico border.
Restive right-wingers took the speaker’s gavel from Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calf.) after he committed an act of bipartisanship: preventing a government shutdown by allowing a vote on a government funding bill that passed with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans in support. For the far-right, working with Democrats is forbidden — even if the alternative means shutting down federal agencies or the House.
This week, Jordan proposed reopening the chamber for legislative business by allowing a temporary speaker to move legislation. Several Democrats voiced support for the idea, raising the prospect of the House functioning with a bipartisan coalition, but right-wingers recoiled.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), for instance, called the idea of sharing power with Democrats “sickening, quite honestly.”
Nehls and other Republicans say that because they control the House, the chamber should only pass bills with Republican votes. It doesn’t matter that Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning any bill that gets signed into law will have to be bipartisan. Instead, the far-right faction imagines that the Senate and president must bend to their will, as though Democrats have no legitimate say in the legislative process — an echo of Trump’s insistence that Biden is an illegitimate president.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described the imperative for Republican-only legislation when he announced his intent to trigger a snap referendum on McCarthy earlier this month: “You cannot use Democrats to roll a majority of the majority.”
In a small way, Jordan’s refusal to disavow Trump’s election lies hurt him in his quest for the speaker’s gavel. One of the 25 Republicans who voted against him in his third attempt this week, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), demanded that Jordan admit Biden won in 2020, which Jordan wouldn’t do. That’s why a reporter asked Jordan about it again Friday.
As Buck put it to HuffPost last week, “If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country, period.”