Monday morning begins another week when there is no speaker of the House. This time, there’s not even a Republican nominee to be speaker. It took Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, three failed ballots before his colleagues pulled the plug on his candidacy.
Since taking over the majority in January, House Republicans have spent the intervening months making history. I mean that in the most pejorative of senses. Every day spent without a speaker at the helm of the House is another milestone in a record that has no equal in its 232-year history. And it’s a run that shows no sign of stopping.
Since taking over the majority in January, House Republicans have spent the intervening months making history.
Jordan’s third attempt saw him get the lowest number of votes the majority party’s candidate has gotten since 1923. But the real kicker was what happened afterward. The final round of voting netted Jordan 194 votes, losing the support of 25 Republicans. A secret ballot held at a meeting of the caucus to determine whether to keep him as the nominee revealed that just 86 of his colleagues thought he should remain the speaker designee. (Reminder: He’d gotten 124 votes against a little-known backbencher to be nominated in the first place.)
But, hey, at least Jordan made it to the House floor. That’s better than Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., the caucus’ first choice to replace deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., managed to do. Scalise withdrew his nomination before a floor vote, rightly seeing that he couldn’t possibly get the roughly 217 votes needed to win the gavel. Jordan, fittingly, was stubborn even though it was obvious from the jump that he couldn’t get 217, either.
McCarthy and Scalise, it should be noted, are longtime rivals, a dynamic that filtered into this current drama. First, McCarthy’s camp was accused of helping sink Scalise’s bid. Then, McCarthy nominated Jordan for the third ballot, showing support for Jordan that he never did for his former deputy. Meanwhile, Jordan’s team reportedly believes Scalise’s folks initiated a quiet pressure campaign to drive down the votes the Judiciary Committee chair would get. That would be unfair, you see, given that Jordan’s surrogates took the trouble to carry out a very loud (and ultimately disastrous) pressure campaign to try to bully their colleagues into voting for Jordan.
Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., who’s charged with overseeing the search for America’s next top congressman, has opted not to throw his bow tie into the ring. He has been cool toward the effort to elect him as a temporary speaker to at least get the ball rolling on stalled legislation. That’s honestly for the best, though, because doing so would most likely require votes from Democrats to pass, and being bipartisan in this moment is apparently the only thing more painful for Republicans than losing multiple ballots because their legislative peers don’t like or respect them.
That doesn’t mean that nobody’s stepping up to the plate. As of Sunday’s deadline, nine candidates had offered up their names. They included several members of Republican leadership: Majority Whip Tom Emmer, of Minnesota, who has McCarthy’s backing; Republican Study Committee chair Kevin Hern, of Oklahoma, who runs the largest caucus in the GOP conference; and Rep. Mike Johnson, of Louisiana, the vice chair of the GOP conference.
A number of backbenchers are also taking swings at jumping to the top of the conference, including Byron Donalds, of Florida, a second-term congressman whose name was alongside McCarthy’s on several speaker ballots in January, and Austin Scott of Georgia, who ran against Jordan after Scalise dropped out. Pete Sessions, of Texas, who played a minor role in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment scandal, is in the running, too, as is Gary Palmer, of Alabama, who is (apparently) the chair of the Republican Policy Committee. There were also several candidates whom even I had to Google, namely Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania and Jack Bergman of Michigan, who for some reason want the job.
It seems illogical that any of the above could look at the wreckage of the last 10 months of GOP rule and decide that he’s the person who can unite the various factions in the House. Because what we’re seeing among the House GOP is what happens when an overarching identity is slowly shattered in real time. All the members in each of the factions pitted against one another call themselves Republicans. What that actually means, though, has changed over the last several decades.
None of the would-be kings scrambling for power has a clear path to winning over opponents in other camps.
As it stands, House Republicans are defined more easily by what they’re against — and that’s whatever Democrats like, generally speaking — than what they stand for as a collective. Their vision for the country, such as it is, remains deeply unpopular outside their deep red enclaves, but many are too entrenched in those districts to ever face real threats of removal. Unless, that is, challengers come along and manage to convince voters that they’re the real Republicans, the ones who would most anger liberals or cheer the loudest for Trump or most quickly close the supposedly wide-open border or whatever other pablum is needed to eke out a primary win.
I’ve noted before that while the factors at work here may have provided a majority for Republicans in the House, those same factors have hollowed out any interest those elected officials have in governing. It’s not exactly a system that fosters cohesion and unity when you’re handed the reins of governing. It’s a system in which, in the absence of real leadership, cracks become fissures. It’s unsurprising, then, that the conservative ethos of hyper-individualism has now prompted this free-for-all.
The self-inflicted political flagellation that has going on for almost three weeks shows little sign of stopping. None of the would-be kings scrambling for power has a clear path to winning over opponents in other camps. Without anything to unite them, the stalemate is likely to drag on until some new crisis — probably in the form of a looming government shutdown — forces action.
And so, the humiliation of the House Republican caucus will continue until someone emerges as a candidate all sides can at least tolerate. Unfortunately, though, it’s not clear that such a person exists. And if that person does, then he or she is by definition smart enough to stick to the sidelines rather than become the next petty tyrant living in constant fear of being overthrown.