Jim Jordan is the heir to the Gingrich Revolution.
Another day, another clusterf***k in the US House of Representatives. After days of behind the scenes haggling (and reports of strong-arming) Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said he was ready to call for a vote to make him the new Speaker of the House. The word on Tuesday morning was that they believed they had commitments for the necessary votes and the worst case scenario would be defections in the single digits, which were being rationalized as protest votes that would fall away on a second ballot. As it turned out Jordan lost 20 votes and after originally calling for another vote in the afternoon they postponed until Wednesday morning.
By the time you read this that vote might have taken place already or perhaps Jordan has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. The rumors are that serious discussions of making the “acting” Speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina a temporary Speaker with full powers to get the House through the appropriations process although nobody seems to know exactly how that would work. Some congressmen are even calling for Kevin McCarthy to be reinstated, which would be the perfect coda to this absurd brouhaha.
One of the main objections to Jim Jordan is that he’s too ideologically extreme and will hurt the Republicans’ chances of maintaining the majority in 2024. There are 18 House members who were elected in those districts that Biden won and it’s assumed they will be in danger if a full-blown MAGA wingnut becomes Speaker of the House. Some of those members voted for Jordan on Tuesday so they aren’t convinced but the Democrats are making it clear that they see this as an opportunity. Jim Jordan’s record is as far right as it gets and he’s joined at the hip with Donald Trump who is as toxic as ever in those districts.
But the idea that Jordan would be a departure from all the alleged statesmen who previously served as Republican Speakers and that the maelstrom that’s engulfed this congress since they took over is competely unprecedented isn’t true. In fact, Jordan and the rest of the House GOP rebels are following in a recent tradition.
Back in the 1980s the Reagan Revolution brought into the Republican House caucus a group of backbench bomb throwers led by an obscure Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich. He was very adept at getting attention from the nascent right wing media represented in those early days by talk radio. He first came to national notice when he maneuvered to oust the then Speaker of the House over an ethics complaint. He said at the time, “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his ethics. There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies. What I really want is to get some people with subpoenas poking around.” (That Gingrich himself had a very similar ethics problem made it a “chef’s kiss” of a political gambit and secured his place in the GOP as a bold, risk taker. )The Speaker in that case was a Democrat and was hastily replaced by another Democrat but that was the play that started it all and led us to where we are today.
Gingrich started his climb into the leadership right away and by 1994 he was not only the undisputed leader of the House Republicans, he was the undisputed leader of the Republican party. When he led them to their massive win in that midterm election, there was talk in the political media that he was going to be a co-President with Bill Clinton and might have to run against him in 1996 for the good of the country.
He and his accomplices reveled in the tales of small state corruption and lurid sexual misdeeds of Arkansas’ gothic political culture and launched the practice of non-stop tabloid House investigations that continues to this day. Their smashmouth rhetoric, the crude character assasination was not unprecedented in American politics but the modern conservative movement under Newt Gingrich took it mainstream.
But the old “live by the sword, die by the sword” trope came back to bite him in 1997 when an insurgent group of 20 or so Representatives from the Gingrich class of 94 felt that he had betrayed their principles and they recruited the Speaker’s top lieutenants to go to him with an ultimatum that he was to step down or they would remove him by parliamentary maneuver. Unfortunately for them, the top lieutenants were a bunch of Keystone Kops and began fighting among themselves only to have the plot leaked to the press before any action could be taken. Gingrich survived but it was clear he was hanging on by a thread.
When his predictions of a massive gain in the 98 midterms turned to dust, he knew he no longer had the support of the caucus and he resigned. At the time half the men in Washington were being exposed as philanderers, and Gingrich was among them, as was the man who maneuvered behind the scenes to edge out his more likely successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana. They finally settled on a little known member of the leadership Illinois Congressman Dennis Hastert who went on to become the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. It was only later that it was discovered that he had been paying off a former student to keep quiet about his molestation of boys when he was a wrestling coach, which landed him 15 months in jail.
When Hastert left he was succeeded by Ohio Rep. John Boehner, one of the original Gingrich coup plotters. As we all know, Boehner was eventually forced out by Tea Party back benchers, Jim Jordan among them. His successor Paul Ryan found himself being jeered at townhalls and rallies and left after two years to be followed by Kevin McCarthy who was just ousted in a parliamentary maneuver much like the one with which the Keystone Kop coup plotters were supposed to threaten Gingrich in 1997.
Jim Jordan is certainly an extremist whose legislative record is non-existent and whose entire career in congress has been devoted to nothing but culture war issues, Fox News hits, insurrection and character assasination. But he’s not unique. (He even has a wrestling coach molestation scandal in his background.) In fact, he is the natural heir to the Gingrich revolution. And there are plenty more just like him.
Update:
Jordan lost his second vote by more than the first one. Back to the drawing board.