Republican Rep. Jim Jordan failed again Wednesday on a crucial second ballot to become House speaker, but the hard-fighting ally of Donald Trump showed no signs of dropping out despite losing support from even more of his GOP colleagues.
Next steps were highly uncertain as angry, frustrated Republicans looked at other options. A bipartisan group of lawmakers floated an extraordinary plan — to give the interim speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., more power to reopen the immobilized House and temporarily conduct routine business. But that seems doubtful, for now.
What was clear was that Jordan’s path to become House speaker was almost certainly lost. He was opposed by 22 Republicans, two more than he lost in first-round voting the day before. Many view the Ohio congressman as too extreme for a central seat of U.S. power and resented the harassing hardball tactics from Jordan’s allies for their votes. One lawmaker said they had received death threats.
The greatest example of this was McCain’s thumbs down vote on them killing Obamacare. There’s an old saying among lawyers that you don’t ask a witness a question that you don’t already know the answer to, and the congressional equivalent should be that you don’t hold a vote you don’t know you’re going to win. The whip and party leadership should have figured out how everyone is planning to vote before even calling the question. Instead, they have to vote 15 times to get the last guy in, and now he’s out again because he had to capitulate to the party’s extremists who are simply lobbing bombs at this point.