The House held just one vote for speaker on Tuesday afternoon, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, lost handily. Twenty Republicans voted against him, a really big hurdle to overcome when you consider that there’s word that he may lose another five or six Republicans’ support on the second ballot. For someone trying to win a job that mostly revolves around keeping track of votes, that doesn’t bode well for him.
It’s also not great when there’s already worry a Speaker Jordan might not be a help raising funds to support House candidates. Neither development is particularly surprising when one considers that Jordan isn’t particularly good at the basics of being a lawmaker, let alone at the more complicated skills it takes to become speaker. There are three main jobs members of Congress have: writing and passing laws, providing a check and balance on the other branches, and serving their constituents. Jordan, amazingly, is bad at all three.
Neither development is particularly surprising when one considers that Jordan isn’t particularly good at the basics of being a lawmaker,
Legislating is the most obvious job a representative has, but since being sworn into the House in 2006, Jordan has been famously lacking on that front. As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out Monday, Jordan has had precisely zero bills signed into law, or even passed in the House, with most getting absolutely no traction. That’s pretty abysmal when you consider that two of those years of his legislative invisibility came when there was a GOP trifecta in Washington. He did nothing to advance his agenda through the law despite his cachet with former President Donald Trump.
The 36 bills that Jordan has introduced in 16 years haven’t exactly been winners, either. Only three were agreed to by the House. And while the number of bills that become law has dwindled in general, Jordan has never seemed particularly dedicated to taking part in the process.
Jordan pays a lot of lip service to government oversight, but his record is decidedly poor, especially when a Republican is in office. Many of his early years in the House were spent riding the wave of tea party anger at former President Barack Obama and blaming him for out-of-control spending (even though it’s Congress that appropriates money) and demanding strict oversight of the executive branch. He spent most of his time in Congress on the House Oversight Committee, where he made a name for himself with his aggressive questioning of Obama administration officials.
That conviction evaporated in 2017, though, as he suddenly became a proponent of “executive privilege” and rejecting legislative oversight — at least when it came to Trump. Jordan was specifically tapped during Trump’s first impeachment to be the House GOP’s official gadfly at hearings, chiding Democrats for daring to question a sitting president’s motives. And as I wrote Tuesday, he was working hand in hand with Trump and his allies to try to keep the former president in office after he lost the 2020 election.
Since Republicans returned the majority this year, Jordan has framed his position as the chair of the Judiciary Committee as a bulwark against the supposed “weaponization” of federal law enforcement against conservatives. The weaponization subcommittee, which he also chairs, was much hyped at the beginning of the year, but it has fizzled since then, with some observers dismissing his efforts as early as March. In total, the subcommittee has had five hearings this year, the last of which was in July and produced no damning evidence. Instead, the committee has chased whatever thing conservatives on X are mad about on a particular day. His efforts to investigate President Joe Biden and prove that there was some kind of Justice Department cover-up to protect his son Hunter have fared little better.
It also bears mentioning that Jordan has held no hearings on the Supreme Court following recent revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’ acceptance of lavish gifts from a billionaire. There has likewise been no call from Jordan for a Supreme Court code of ethics or any assertion that Congress has the power to impose one. If Jordan really cared about oversight of the other branches, this issue would be right in his wheelhouse.
But how much credit should Jordan get for spending much of his time on Fox News deliberately misleading his constituents about things like supposed fraud in the 2020 election?
Jordan’s performance on the third front, serving his constituents as their representative, is a bit harder to judge. On one hand, the counties that make up Ohio’s 4th Congressional District are overwhelmingly white, and almost all of them supported Trump by wide margins in the 2020 election. So, in one sense, he’s reflecting many of his voters’ views with his rabble-rousing and support for the MAGA movement. But how much credit should Jordan get for spending much of his time on Fox News deliberately misleading his constituents about things like supposed fraud in the 2020 election?
For a more objective metric, we can look at how much federal spending he has brought home since he has been in office. Jordan has never been a fan of earmarks, and to his credit, he hasn’t taken part in the recently revived earmark system in the House, now referred to as “Community Project Funding,” in any of the last three years. But even without them, the amount of funding going to Jordan’s district from fiscal year 2008, which began during Jordan’s first term in Congress, to fiscal year 2023 has tripled, according to USASpending.gov.
Among the biggest-ticket items last year in Jordan’s district, which receives similar amounts of spending per capita as nearby parts of Ohio, were payments for Social Security benefits, Medicare prescription drug coverage and defense contracts signed with companies that have factories within the district’s borders. The state also received more than $3 billion last year in funding for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. I note all this because one of Jordan’s main goals as speaker would be to trigger major across-the-board spending cuts that would slash billions of dollars from military spending and SNAP alike. Would that be in the best interest of his constituents?
In contrast, there are two jobs that Jordan has excelled at as a member of Congress: promoting Jim Jordan and keeping other people from doing their jobs. He has spent most of his eight terms standing in the way of new laws’ passing, opposing federal funding to needy communities and running defense for the likes of Trump. In doing so, he has made himself the face of a movement more dedicated to breaking things than building them. Small wonder, then, that he now finds himself unable to build a winning coalition.
