On Monday night, Marjorie Taylor Greene was confident that Jim Jordan would become Speaker on Tuesday. While there were a lot of dissidents within the Republican conference — 55 had said they would refuse to vote for Jordan in a secret ballot last week — she was sure they would come around. “I think when we get to the floor, these people that have been saying they refuse to vote for Jim Jordan, they’re not going to have the courage to say that,” she said.
It turned out they had the courage.
Twenty Republicans voted against Jordan on the House floor on Tuesday, a resounding defeat for the hard-right conservative who had maneuvered his way to becoming the Speaker-designate after weeks of parliamentary twists and turns incited by a successful effort to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
After McCarthy was removed, Jordan and Steve Scalise became the immediate front-runners for Speaker. Scalise won a closed-door leadership election last week, but he bowed out due to conservative intransigence. Although Scalise beat out Jordan, a number of Jordan supporters loudly insisted that they would never vote for anyone else, and Scalise decided against going to the House floor and facing an embarrassing loss. On Tuesday, the coalition amassed against Jordan included loyalists of both McCarthy and Scalise, moderates from swing districts, and rogues.
Mario Diaz-Balart, a longtime Republican stalwart from South Florida, made clear he would never back Jordan. While insisting that he has a “great relationship” with Jordan, Diaz-Balart argued that any possibility of negotiations ceased once intimidation tactics were tried against him. Instead, Diaz-Balart insisted he would keep on voting for Scalise, saying he was just “voting for the guy who won the election.”
Some of the other Jordan opponents took the same tack. Carlos Gimenez of Florida has long insisted he was “only Kevin” and would keep voting for McCarthy to be Speaker due to his rage over his ouster. Others were swing-district moderates like Mike Lawler of New York and Tony Gonzales of Texas who were wary of casting a vote for a hard-right candidate like Jordan.
The opposition to Jordan was not limited to concerns about the Ohio Republican himself but also regarded his backers, the hard-right Republicans who ousted McCarthy and insisted that they would only vote for Jordan even though Scalise won a majority in a conference vote. Don Bacon told reporters last week that it would be “rewarding bad behavior” if Jordan’s supporters could make him Speaker after torpedoing two more popular alternatives.
Part of the appeal of Jordan, though, was that he would actually keep far-right Republicans in line.
Bob Good, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, insisted Jordan was “the second most popular Republican in the country” and would appeal to “the grassroots Republican base” who consume only conservative media and are convinced that Republican failures in Washington are simply because their elected officials are always too weak.
“I think he’s the best chance we have to stay out of a shutdown, and he’s the best chance to get our base and conservative media to buy into what we’re doing,” Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told reporters on Monday regarding why he was supporting Jordan. McCarthy was ousted after he successfully forged a deal to avoid government shutdown and only months after he upset many conservatives by preventing the United States from defaulting on its debt.
Jordan will win back at least one vote whenever a second ballot is held. Doug LaMalfa, a friend of McCarthy’s dating back to their time serving in the California legislature together, said he would vote for Jordan on a second ballot after casting a protest vote for McCarthy on the first. “I’m just really angry over the whole thing because it was all based on really false premises,” he said about the circumstances that led to McCarthy losing the gavel earlier this month.
In his view, this was all fruitless in the long run. “We just pulled something out by the roots in Kevin, and we’re going a different direction but for almost the same pieces of silver there on the table … Because Jim’s gonna have to agree to a lot of the same things that Kevin was already on board with. So what have we changed?” But he was still willing to be a team player.
In contrast, other longtime thorns in the side of House GOP leadership, like Byron Donalds of Florida, were just watching from the back. “It’s kind of boring,” admitted Donalds, who said it was the first time he’d watched the entire vote for Speaker after being caught up in negotiations during all 15 rounds in January to elect McCarthy as Speaker, even spending several rounds as a candidate for those opposed to McCarthy.
Now it’s up to Jordan to decide whether he is willing to go through a continued series of floor votes in hopes that he can somehow grind down his opponents or if he will decide that there is no path for him to win over the 217 Republicans necessary for him to take the Speaker’s gavel. Either way, House Republicans are poised to spend the coming days, if not weeks, in turmoil.
