What’s Worse: MAGA Speaker Jim Jordan or No Speaker at All?

Next up? Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Nine days after Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the House GOP seems incapable of naming a successor. On October 11, House Republicans nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise as their candidate for the job, but he’s already withdrawn from the race as he cannot get even close to the 217 votes he’d need to actually become Speaker in a formal vote in which the chamber’s 212 Democrats will participate. Now, the candidate who finished second to Scalise in the closed-door Republican conference vote, Jim Jordan, will make a bid to win the nomination, though he is on record opposing any floor vote until some Republican has nailed down the necessary votes to win, avoiding the 15-ballot fiasco that gave McCarthy a heavily mortgaged gavel back in January.

While there’s reportedly been some consolidation around Jordan, he still has many obstacles to overcome before he gets the gavel. Several Scalise loyalists are furious at Jordan for allegedly threatening the Speaker-designate with a revolt if he couldn’t get to 217 instantly. The small but hardy band of House GOP moderates aren’t jazzed about being led by a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus who helped trigger and perpetuate the last major government shutdown in 2018–19 and is now closely aligned with Donald Trump’s election denialism and efforts to demonize Joe Biden. There is a rump faction of Republicans still determined to restore McCarthy to power. And there remains the skulking sideline figure of Trump, who has endorsed Jordan but isn’t doing much to help him.

In their desperation, some Republicans are hoping for a deal with Democrats to help elect a Speaker instead of voting in a bloc for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries (as they did throughout McCarthy’s 15 ballots). The price Democrats are sure to demand involves a degree of bipartisanship in House operations that is anathema to a sizable number of Republicans; indeed, McCarthy’s limited willingness to deal with the devils on the other side of the partisan divide was largely why he was given the boot. Certainly Jordan is not going to participate in some sort of coalition government. His record of extremism has been consistent throughout his years in Congress, as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake recently reminded us:

For much of the 2010s, Jordan was a key leader of GOP efforts to push the government toward shutdowns while holding out for concessions. That was the case in 2013 when it was about defunding Obamacare, in 2015 when it was about Planned Parenthood funding, and in 2018 when it was about the border wall.

In the last instance, Jordan was more intent even than fellow members of the Freedom Caucus to force the issue. The result was the longest shutdown in history.

Should Jordan actually win the gavel in the coming days, he’s made it abundantly clear that any deal to keep the government open when the current stopgap funding runs out in early November must include an absolute ban on further admission of migrants. To put it mildly, another shutdown is very likely.

But a rampaging MAGA Speaker may be better than no Speaker at all. The House is completely paralyzed until someone with actual power occupies the chair. You can hear some muttering about Republicans giving Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry additional powers to entertain emergency funding measures and other must-pass legislation, but McHenry’s close association with the rejected McCarthy makes that highly improbable. And so the House — and consequently the Congress — drifts on aimlessly, even as demands from the White House and both parties in the Senate for additional funding for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and, yes, the border echo around the Capitol.

Up until now, it’s been possible to enjoy the House GOP clown show as an ongoing illustration of what Washington will be like if voters give these people continued or expanded power next year (perhaps in conjunction with a newly Republican Senate and — shudder — a second Trump administration). But nobody should be laughing anymore. Ensuring a functioning national legislature should be a minimum expectation for any political party, left, right, or center. Congress survived a violent insurrectionist attack on the Capitol in January 2021. But now it must overcome the slow-motion riot convulsing the House GOP.