Evelyn Reynolds

Republican nominee Jim Jordan will continue his campaign for speaker of the House despite losing the second round of balloting for the position this afternoon.“We’re going to keep going,” Jordan’s spokesman Russell Dye told me.The House has once again failed to agree on electing a speaker, with Jim Jordan rejected for the second time in two days after 22 Republicans said no to their party’s nominee. What happens now? Who knows. Some Republicans want to hold a vote on giving acting speaker Patrick McHenry the job’s full powers so the chamber can get back to legislating on issues like aid to Israel and government funding. Jordan has said he would be in favor of holding a vote on that motion, but has also vowed to stay in the race. It appears we will not find out how Republicans’ conundrum resolves itself today – no more votes are expected in the House.Here’s a look back on the day:
Capitol police were arresting protesters in a House office building, who had entered by the hundreds to demand a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and for Israel to allow humanitarian aid.
Jordan pleaded for unity, but one of his supporters warned he would lose more support in the second round of voting – and was right.
Romney-Cruz 2016? Not as far-fetched as it sounds, former Republican presidential candidate turned senator from Utah Mitt Romney writes in a new book.
McHenry’s acting capacity means pretty much all he can do is gavel the House into and out of session, and count the votes for speaker.
A Jordan opponent voted for John Boehner. Remember him?
The House is done with voting for the day, a source familiar with the matter tells me, as Republican lawmakers remain unable to agree on elevating rightwing congressman Jim Jordan to the speaker’s post.Hours ago, the second election to install Jordan as Kevin McCarthy’s successor failed after 22 Republicans and all Democrats rejected his candidacy for speaker. The House then adjourned, though there was speculation lawmakers could return for another round of voting, or to consider a resolution to give acting speaker Patrick McHenry the job.Police have arrested some of what appear to be hundreds of protesters who converged on the US Capitol calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and for Israel to allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory.The protest was organized by activist group Jewish Voice for Peace, which said some of its members had planned acts of civil disobedience. Reporters in the Capitol say the arrests took place in the Cannon office building, where House lawmakers have their chambers and which is open to the public:Here are more photos from the protest:For the latest on the conflict in the Gaza Strip, and Joe Biden’s just-concluded visit to Israel, follow our live blog:Texas’s Republican representative Chip Roy said that to grant further powers to the House’s speaker pro tempore in order to resume the House’s business “makes no sense” and is “directly contradictory to the Constitution.”Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Roy said:
“We should do our job and select a speaker. The constitution says that so any move to do otherwise is contrary to the Constitution and would do enormous damage to not just the Republican party but the House of Representatives. I violently oppose any effort to do that on the floor of the House…
I think it is directly contrary to the Constitution in terms of saying that we shall choose a speaker and to go appoint somebody with the full powers of the speaker without having chosen the speaker. It makes no sense so I think we need to take a step back, do our job and choose a speaker.”
He went on to add that he will support Jim Jordan for House speaker “for however long it takes.”As Jim Jordan fails for the second time to garner enough votes to become speaker, a handful of Republicans are speaking out about the strong-arming they have been facing by Jordan’s allies in attempts to make him speaker, including allegedly sending anonymous text messages.On Tuesday, 20 Republicans voted against the hard-right Ohioan’s speakership, continuing to leave the House in a state of limbo since extremist Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy in a historic vote earlier this month.With Jordan struggling to secure the 217 votes needed to become speaker of the House, several Republicans have told Politico of Jordan’s “broader team … playing hardball” in attempts to garner votes.The Nebraska congressman Don Bacon – one of the 20 Republicans who voted against Jordan in the first vote – told the outlet that his wife had received anonymous texts that warned of her husband never holding office again.Screenshots of the alleged text messages sent to Bacon’s wife and shared with Politico showed one saying: “Talk to your husband tell him to step up and be a leader and help the Republican party get a speaker. There’s too much going on in the world for all this going on in Republican party. You guys take five steps forward and then turn around take 20 steps backwards – no wonder our party always ends up getting screwed over.”For further details, click here:Here is video of the moment a pro-Palestinian protestor interrupted the former treasury secretary Jack Lew’s Senate confirmation hearing for ambassador to Israel.“How many children need to be killed? Our families are dying! We need a ceasefire now!” the protestor yelled at Joe Biden’s pick as security escorted him out of the room.Another protestor then appeared, yelling: “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza … and we’re funding it!” She also was escorted out by security.Utah’s Republican senator Mitt Romney considered a third presidential bid in 2016 in attempts to stop Donald Trump with “scary” Texas senator Ted Cruz, a new book reveals.The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:“Romney was willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took,” McKay Coppins writes in Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of the 2012 Republican nominee written in close cooperation with its subject.“He might even be able to swallow sharing a ticket with Cruz, a man he’d described as ‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal. But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump. The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”Widely trailed, Coppins’ book will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. A spokesperson for Cruz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.For further details, click here:Democratic minority House speaker Hakeem Jeffries who received 212 votes on Wednesday urged Republicans to work alongside Democrats, tweeting:
“The time has come for House Republicans to reject extremism and embrace bipartisanship.”
Jeffries’ tweet follows another one he made earlier in the day in which he called on House Republicans to “get real, end the Republican Civil War and join House Democrats in a bipartisan path forward.”The House has once again failed to agree on electing a speaker, with Jim Jordan rejected for the second time in two days after 22 Republicans said no to their party’s nominee. What happens now? Who knows. Some Republicans want to hold a vote on giving acting speaker Patrick McHenry the job’s full powers so the chamber can get back to legislating on issues like aid to Israel and government funding. Jordan has said he would be in favor of holding a vote on that motion, but he has also vowed to stay in the race. We’ll see if he opts to push for a third round of voting.Here’s a recap of the day so far:
Jordan pleaded for unity, but one of his supporters warned he would lose more support in the second round of voting – and was right.
McHenry’s acting capacity means he can pretty much just gavel the House into and out of session, and count the votes for speaker.
A Jordan opponent voted for John Boehner. Remember him?
It’s tough to tell what happens next in the House.Democratic whip Katherine Clark has told members “additional votes are possible today”, but there’s no saying when, or if, that happens.A Republican aide told the Guardian’s US politics live blog that the party’s lawmakers were told to expect a meeting of the Republican conference, but that has not yet been officially scheduled.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell is at the Capitol, and spotted one of the surest signs that lawmakers aren’t leaving anytime soon: pizza is being delivered.With their party apparently deadlocked over making Jim Jordan speaker of the House, more Republicans are calling to make Patrick McHenry the chamber’s leader.McHenry took over as acting speaker following Kevin McCarthy’s ouster two weeks ago, while the GOP has nominated Jordan to become his permanent replacement. But Jordan has now twice failed to secure a majority of votes necessary to ascend to speaker’s chair, and some supporters now think it would be best to give McHenry the job and allow the chamber to begin functioning again.Here’s California’s David Valadao, who represents a Democratic-leaning district and backed Jordan in the just-concluded round of voting:Jordan’s detractors are also making their case to give McHenry the job. Here’s Jen Kiggans, a recent arrival in the House who represents a Virginia swing district:And another vulernable Republican, Carlos Gimenez, remains upset about McCarthy’s removal. He, too, is in favor of putting McHenry in charge:Republican nominee Jim Jordan will continue his campaign for speaker of the House despite losing the second round of balloting for the position this afternoon.“We’re going to keep going,” Jordan’s spokesman Russell Dye told me.“No person having received a majority the whole number of votes cast by surname, a speaker has not been elected,” Patrick McHenry declared from the House dais.What now? Some Republicans want to hold a vote on expanding McHenry’s powers from acting speaker to full speaker of the House. Earlier today, Jim Jordan said he would be in favor of putting that resolution up for consideration.That could be a very interesting affair, since Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said the party may be open to supporting that, but McHenry gaveled the House into recess, so it seems that vote won’t happen right away.Jim Jordan has lost the second election for House speaker, as more Republicans voted against elevating him to the chamber’s leadership role.Jordan lost 22 GOP votes, two more than in the initial round of balloting on Tuesday. He received 199 votes in total, while Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries received 212.Voting appears to be over, and we are now waiting for acting speaker Patrick McHenry to make the result official.Jim Jordan has for the second day in a row failed to receive a majority vote to become speaker. After McHenry confirms the election, the question will become: what will the GOP do now?There are now 21 no votes against Jordan – one more than in the first round of balloting yesterday.The election has not yet concluded, but his margin of defeat is an indication of the amount of opposition Jordan will have to overcome if he is ever to get the speaker’s gavel.Democrats, meanwhile, have unanimously voted for their minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. He has received 200 votes to Jordan’s 184.Jim Jordan’s Republican objectors have voted for other politicians, usually former members of the House.Pennsylvania’s Mike Kelly voted for John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House from 2011 to 2015, who resigned his position in part due to trouble with the party’s conservative wing:Michigan’s John James voted for former GOP congresswoman Candice Miller, one of the more obscure names called out in this round of voting, More

As Jim Jordan fails for the second time to garner enough votes to become speaker, a handful of Republicans are speaking out about the strong-arming they have been facing by Jordan’s allies in attempts to make him speaker, including allegedly anonymous text messages.On Tuesday, 20 Republicans voted against the hard-right Ohioan’s speakership, leaving the House in a continued state of limbo since extremist Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy in a historic vote earlier this month.With Jordan struggling to secure the 217 votes needed to become speaker of the House, several Republicans have told Politico of Jordan’s “broader team … playing hardball” in attempts to garner votes.The Nebraska congressman Don Bacon – one of the 20 Republicans who voted against Jordan in the first vote – told the outlet that his wife had reportedly received anonymous texts that warned of her husband never holding office again.Screenshots of the alleged text messages sent to Bacon’s wife and shared with Politico showed one saying: “Talk to your husband tell him to step up and be a leader and help the Republican party get a speaker. There’s too much going on in the world for all this going on in Republican party. You guys take five steps forward and then turn around take 20 steps backwards – no wonder our party always ends up getting screwed over.”Another message read: “Why is your husband causing chaos by not supporting Jim Jordan? I thought he was a team player.”In response, Bacon’s wife wrote: “Who is this???”The anonymous individual then wrote: “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappoint [sic] and failure he is.”Bacon’s wife then replied: “He has more courage than you. You won’t put your name to your statements.”Speaking to Politico, Bacon said: “Jim’s been nice, one-on-one, but his broader team has been playing hardball.”The publication also reported that other Republicans saying that they had received a “barrage of calls” from various local conservative leaders.House Republicans also told the outlet that Jordan and his allies had been “calling people who voted for him trying to stop the bleeding” and went on to say that those calls were “pissing off” members.“He’s lost support because of this … Constant smears – it’s just dishonesty at its core,” one House Republican told Politico anonymously.According to the Ohio Republican David Joyce, Jordan “didn’t necessarily support the strategy”, Politico reports. Nevertheless, the pressuring tactics appear to have backfired, after 20 Republicans refused to vote for Jordan on Tuesday.The Florida congressman Carlos Giménez, who voted against Jordan on Tuesday, told Politico that he was not going to change his mind, “especially now, in the light of these pressure tactics”.Giménez’s fellow Florida congressman Mario Díaz-Balart echoed similar sentiments to the outlet, saying: “The one thing that will never work with me – if you try to pressure me, if you try to threaten me, then I shut off.”Following Tuesday’s vote, Fox News host Sean Hannity published a list of the 20 Republicans who voted against Jordan, along with their numbers.“We encourage you to call them – politely, of course – and encourage these holdouts to throw their support behind Jordan and get the country moving again!” Hannity’s website wrote.In a second vote, on Wednesday, the number of Republicans voting against Jordan rose to 22.In a letter issued earlier this week, Jordan warned against the in-party attacks, saying: “The country and our conference cannot afford us attacking each other right now. As Republicans, we are blessed to have an energetic conference comprised of members with varied background, experiences, and skills – just like the country we represent.” More

Mitt Romney considered a desperate, third presidential bid in 2016, aiming to stop Donald Trump as part of an unlikely unity ticket with Ted Cruz – a hard-right Texas senator who Romney privately considered “scary” and “a demagogue”, a new book reports.“Romney was willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took,” McKay Coppins writes in Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of the 2012 Republican nominee written in close cooperation with its subject.“He might even be able to swallow sharing a ticket with Cruz, a man he’d described as ‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal. But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump. The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”Widely trailed, Coppins’ book will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. A spokesperson for Cruz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump stormed to the nomination. Beating Hillary Clinton, he had four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden. Trump refused to go quietly, however, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress and now dominating polling for the next Republican nomination despite facing 91 criminal charges and an array of civil cases.Romney, now 76, is a former venture capitalist, Massachusetts governor and Winter Olympics chief executive who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 then won it in 2012. Beaten by Barack Obama, he entered the next election as a party grandee.Describing backstage machinations by power players seeking to stop Trump, Coppins says Romney was approached five days before the New Hampshire primary by Robert O’Brien, a friend and adviser, and Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri.“The party was in crisis,” Coppins writes. “An interloping frontrunner was on the verge of hijacking the GOP, and the rest of the field had shown they couldn’t beat him. If no one else stepped up by 1 March, they argued, Romney should enter the race and tap Cruz as his running mate to unite Republican opposition to Trump.“O’Brien and Talent called this the ‘Robert Kennedy’ strategy – get in late to build momentum, win enough delegates to keep the frontrunner from clinching the nomination, then march into the convention girded for a floor fight.”Robert F Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary late, tapping a surge of support before being assassinated in California.Coppins says Romney entertained the Cruz idea, telling Talent and O’Brien his “number one priority is to stop Trump”.Formally, Romney broke with Trump after Trump refused to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Quoting Romney’s journal, Coppins says he reached for the words of Winston Churchill, writing: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air …” In public, Romney denounced Trump in a speech, calling him a “phony” and a “fraud”. That didn’t move the needle, so Romney reportedly sought to form another anti-Trump ticket, with Cruz as nominee for president and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator also in the race, as the Texan’s running mate. That didn’t work either. The two men were “just too self-interested”, Coppins writes, adding: “With each passing day of inaction, Trump gained more votes, more delegates and more momentum.”Coppins’ reporting lands amid a 2024 primary in which a huge Republican field has again refused to coalesce round one alternative to Trump.In 2016, Romney also tried to “usher John Kasich out of the race”, Coppins writes. The former Ohio governor refused, prompting Romney to write in his journal: “Delusion runs deep in politicians’ veins.” Romney sent Kasich “a series of increasingly gruff emails”, telling him to drop out, back Cruz then fight for the nomination at the convention. Kasich, Coppins writes, responded with “more stump speech pablum”.“Refusing to believe that Kasich was so obtuse that he couldn’t grasp basic math, Romney began to entertain the theory that Kasich was somehow back-channeling with Trump. How else to explain his bullheaded commitment to a nonsensical strategy that only helped the frontrunner?”Nothing worked. Trump became president.In a move symbolic of how many top Republicans soon resigned themselves to Trump, O’Brien, the man with the Romney-Cruz plan, ultimately became Trump’s last national security adviser.Romney became a Utah senator in 2018, going on to twice vote to impeach Trump and then call him a demagogue in a stinging retirement announcement last month. But even Romney was not immune to temptation. Coppins describes a famously humiliating flirtation with becoming secretary of state after Trump won power in 2016.“Finally, Trump cut to the chase. ‘You really need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific and that I’ll be a great president. We need to clear this up.’“But Romney couldn’t bring himself to do it.” More

In times of chaos and dissension, you will often hear pundits, professionals, and those who self-identify as serious call for an “adult in the room”. The “adult in the room” is a person willing to make difficult compromises, a person willing to sacrifice vanity for pragmatism, a person with a clear eye of their own priorities and needs and more determination to achieve them than a desire to make a point.Over the past weeks, some have called for “an adult in the room” at the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives: as the House majority party fails, over and over again, to find a new speaker, having exiled Kevin McCarthy from the post on 3 October, it can seem that what the Republicans need is someone more level-headed and serious, someone willing to accept imperfect compromises and to subvert his own ego for the good of the party, someone who might even possess a quality that passes for dignity.But to call the Republican House caucus children, to declare that the far-right firebrands who ousted McCarthy from the speakership at the beginning of the month and are now trying to hoist Jim Jordan into it, would be to miss the point. The far-right caucus that has instigated the Republican speaker fight is not constituted by hysterics driven by emotionalism. They are acting rationally, pursuing their own very clear incentives.Last week it looked, briefly, as if all this might be put behind us. The House Republican caucus nominated Steve Scalise to be speaker. The Louisiana Republican once gave a speech at a gathering hosted by a white supremacist group, and has called himself “David Duke without the baggage”. This, we were told, was the Republican party’s pragmatic consensus candidate. His support fell apart almost immediately, and his candidacy for the speakership never proceeded to a floor vote.Next up was Jim Jordan, an insurrectionist from Ohio, whose claims to fame range from allegedly helping to cover up sexual abuse of student athletes while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State, to largely causing the 2013 and 2018 government shutdowns, to helping to coordinate Trump’s attempted coup in the wake of the 2020 election. That last effort included pressuring Mike Pence to illegally throw out the electoral votes at the January 6 congressional joint session, and overturn the election results.Jordan defied subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, and has still never admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. After the January 6 insurrection, he reached out to Donald Trump’s administration in search of a pardon. John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, once called Jordan a “legislative terrorist”, but it’s not clear that he actually does much legislating: during his nearly two decades in the House, not a single bill that he has introduced has become law.On Tuesday, Jim Jordan failed to garner enough votes to win the speakership on the House floor. The chamber adjourned, and the Republican party slipped deeper into the backbiting and dysfunction that has paralyzed even the most basic functions of Congress one month before a government shutdown and amid a slew of mounting national crises.Let’s be clear about something: men like Scalise and Jordan – extremists and election deniers, comfortable with white supremacy and willing to discard democratic principles – have ascended to what counts for leadership in the Republican conference not in spite of the depravity of their positions, but because of them. They are the products of rightwing political, fundraising and media apparatuses that incentivize candidates to move further and further to the right – and which have left the Republican party itself both unable and unwilling to impose discipline on its politicians.In many ways, the Republican party brought this internal dysfunction on itself. In a project that spanned decades, Republicans and their allies built a vast conservative media infrastructure and developed an impressive skill for shaping and whetting the ideological appetites of their audience, creating a more and more conservative base.At the same time, Republicans seized control of state legislatures and their congressional redistricting powers, creating safely Republican House seats that were insulated from democratic competition, and where the only meaningfully competitive elections were in Republican primaries – thereby insuring that dozens of Republican congressmen would view the greatest threat to their careers as a primary challenge from their right. And so a base of more and more conservative voters began demanding – and electing – more and more conservative politicians, a cycle that has given us Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and no small number of other embarrassments.It has also given us the rise of a new and sinister character: a Republican politician with no interest in public service and an ideological opposition to government functioning, whose incentives drive them not to govern or compromise, but to make constant demonstrations of their own conservatism – to offend and shock, throw sand in the gears, prevent the ordinary functioning of government bodies, and above all, to draw as much attention as possible to themselves.Viewed from this angle, it is not hard to see why the Republicans have failed, over and over again, to elect a speaker or assure the functionality of their conference. Why would they? With the drama high and the cameras trained on them, the obstructionist Republicans are already getting everything they want.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

As economic misery in the US persists, the country’s self-help industry has become a multibillion-dollar bonanza. If one reads enough of that industry’s happiness catechism – including its latest bestseller, Build the Life You Want – one realizes that all of the advice revolves around a core set of directives: focus on the self rather than the collective, redeploy hours to different priorities, spend less time at work, build deeper personal relationships – and, by implication, buy more self-help books.But if “time is money”, then in America’s survival-of-the-richest form of capitalism, time-intensive remedies are mostly for the affluent – that is, those with a big enough savings account to de-risk career changes; those with enough income to afford gym memberships, hobbies and excursions; those with enough paid leave and cash to enjoy the best vacations; those with enough resources to employ personal aides to do paperwork, chores and cleaning; those with enough workplace leverage to secure more hours off for introspection, friend time and outdoor adventures.Erasure of privilege disparity and presumption of wealth has turned most self-help products into a series of Stuart Smalley affirmations for the already and nearly comfortable. But while such class bias pervades the happiness industry, it is particularly egregious coming from the author of the aforementioned Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks, hardly a disinterested bystander in this epoch of economic anxiety and its attendant unhappiness.As the former $2.7m-a-year head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – one of the country’s most prominent conservative thinktanks – Brooks spent a decade sowing the despair he now insists he is here to cure.Brooks’ career turn from let-them-eat-cake ideologue to I-feel-your-pain happiness prophet may seem bizarre. But he is walking the well-trodden – and lucrative – path from arsonist to firefighter. It is a trail previously blazed by financial crisis-era deregulators now platformed as credible economic experts, and by Iraq war proponents reimagined as leaders of a pro-democracy resistance.In Brooks’ case, he led an organization that repeatedly worked to help its billionaire and corporate donors prevent working-class Americans from securing the better standard of living, universal benefits and leisure time that undergird the countries consistently reporting the world’s highest levels of happiness.Citing a colleague’s book deriding Americans as “takers”, Brooks insisted the central crisis facing the nation is not a notoriously thin social safety net – but politicians who “offer one government benefit after another to our citizens”, complaining that this “has made a majority of Americans into net beneficiaries of the welfare state”.He declared war on “labor unions and state employees demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions”. Under his leadership, the AEI railed against “entitlement” programs, tried to privatize and gut social security, opposed Medicaid expansion, opposed free college, opposed rent control and fought against free healthcare.Now, Brooks’ pivot to happiness guru is disseminating that political agenda via the soft agitprop of self-discovery and self-improvement. Along the way, Brooks is being boosted by (among others) the Atlantic, NPR and Oprah Winfrey (who is listed as co-author of the book, although in reality she only writes a handful of introductory paragraphs to each chapter) – together the most coveted media seals of approval for liberal readers whose purported ideals Brooks spent his career grinding into political dust, but who are now enriching him with $30 book purchases.On its face, Build the Life You Want offers a mix of reasonable – if banal – life advice, parables, reasonably clear distillations of complex philosophical and linguistic concepts, and synthesized academic research. The book engages in pop metaphysics that limits its ambition for the more science- and liberal-minded from the get-go, letting us know that achieving “happiness” – as some final stage of contentment – is impossible. But, Brooks insists, “we can be happier” in relative terms.“Unlike other books you may have read,” he tells us, “this one is not going to exhort you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This isn’t a book about willpower ​​– it’s about knowledge, and how to use it.”Which is all to say, this book is absolutely about how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and follow concrete steps to self-contentment, but doing so with some reputable sociology and psychology studies as your guide rather than the quasi-fascist bromides about being an alpha dog one typically hears from the likes of Jordan Peterson. But the general motivational tone and reactionary political premises are the same.The book kicks off in earnest with a scrappy, can-do story of self-determination on the part of Brooks’ Spanish mother-in-law, “Albina”, who is used as a template for self-fulfillment.In the introduction, titled Albina’s Secret, we are told that, after years of living with an abusive husband and a fraught domestic life, “One day, when Albina was forty-five, something changed for her. For reasons that were not clear to her friends and family, her outlook on life seemed to shift. It’s not that she was suddenly less lonely, or that she mysteriously came into money, but for some reason, she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life. The most obvious change she made was to enroll in college to become a teacher.”Brooks asserts that the primary change that propelled Albina toward midlife happiness was her shift from worrying about “the outside world” to looking inward.“She switched,” Brooks tells us, from “wishing others were different, to working on the one person she could control: herself.”Personal responsibility is a hallmark of the self-help genre, and Brooks’ breezy title has this convention in spades. In his telling, changing “the outside world” as a pathway to peace and happiness is a fool’s errand. Like virtually all self-help books, we are told the road to self-satisfaction is found within – not with our circumstances, but how we respond to our circumstances.This is a convention of the capitalist self-help genre for one obvious reason: it requires nothing in the “outside world” to change. And once one gets into the messiness of “changing the outside world”, one ventures into political theory. This is uncomfortable and can’t be put into an earth-toned 700-page book that rich Atlantic subscribers will want to buy.Albina’s solution, Brooks tells us, wasn’t to find her local underground socialist party or union headquarters and join a political movement to combat the Franco regime, or to try to materially improve the lot of other women sharing her gender-based suffering – it was to ignore “the outside world” and instead focus on a career shift and a switch in attitude.Like a lot of self-help advice, this works on a micro scale. Surely, it’s too great an ask to demand a middle-aged mother in an economically precarious situation join the fight against the Franco regime. But Brooks is constitutionally uninterested in the forces of patriarchy and capitalism that co-authored the misery – not because they’re irrelevant to his self-help brand of anti-politics, but because of it.Self-help makes grand claims about human progress, it offers advice to the masses on how they can improve their lot – it is inherently political by its nature. But Brooks does not tell us that we can be empowered by making demands of the powerful, or joining a union or a political movement, but – how else – by buying his book.This is Brooks’ big trick: his happiness recommendations presume a society that can and will never change from the one he helped craft in Washington.In today’s AEI-sculpted America, millions are deprived of the building blocks of happiness such as guaranteed healthcare, free higher education, paid family leave, workplace empowerment, retirement security and a host of other social democratic pillars that sustain the world’s happiest societies. Unwilling to allow for the possibility that such conditions can or should change in the United States, Brooks nonetheless presents happiness as an achievable self-centric project inside the dystopia he helped create.Build the Life You Want follows Brooks’ first foray into the happiness industry – a book called From Strength to Strength that is about “finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life”.That monograph argues that because of the way humans’ brains change, one’s professional decline begins much earlier than we expect. The book suggests that workers in midlife should therefore move into work roles that require less cognitive innovation (fluid intelligence) and more teaching of acquired wisdom (crystallized intelligence).It is an important finding that might prompt a broader discussion of policies that could account for this inevitability – retraining programs, funding for midlife career education, universal portable benefits that allow for job switches and earlier retirement ages. But ever the conservative ideologue, Brooks eschews all that, instead channeling the old conservative trope that failing to change professional trajectory – or being demoralized by the work treadmill – is just a mental flaw in one’s personal outlook.“Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things,” he writes, in a call for a mass change of attitude.What prevents necessary career shifts that might lead to happiness, Brooks asserts, is “self-objectification, workaholism, and most of all success addiction that chain us to our declining fluid intelligence curve.”“What do I want to do with my time this week to cultivate the relationships that will result in that end scenario?” Brooks says he asks himself in order to imagine an existence of stronger personal bonds. “I might make the decision to leave work on time, leave my work at the office, get home for dinner, and watch a movie after dinner with my family.”In this dreamscape, most Americans get to choose when they work, and under what conditions. Nowhere in Brooks’ world of lanyards does he consider that Americans working ever-longer hours and ever-more jobs may have less to do with career ambition than with simply trying to earn enough to pay the ever-increasing bills – bills that fund the ballooning profits of the kind of donors who can pay Brooks’ upwards of $125,000 speaking fee or write six-figure checks to outfits like the AEI.This same ideology carries into Build the Life You Want, where Brooks repeatedly hints at a deeper theme of overwork and soul-sucking labor, but avoids the obvious indicators and instead moves on to sell his brand of self-analysis – with little consideration of systemic problems.Recapping researchers documenting how humans are usually good at categorizing their own positive associations, Brooks notes that “activities that were most negative and least positive were commuting and spending time with one’s boss”.He caps this off with a joke: “Obviously, then, it’s definitely best not to commute with your boss.” It’s clear that people’s least favorite activities are related to working dreary, miserable jobs.Does this prompt Brooks to apologize for leading the fight against proposals for government-sponsored healthcare that could end the employer-based system and free Americans to search for more fulfilling jobs without fear of losing access to medical services?No, it’s the subject of a wisecrack and he moves on.This isn’t to say the book is uninterested in “careers” – it very much is. It just doesn’t care much for jobs, or the masses who occupy work for work’s sake, to stave off starvation and homelessness – what novelist Ursula K Le Guin called kleggich, or “drudgery”, work that the vast majority of people do day in and day out for survival.The target demographic for Brooks is the aggressively middle and upper class, so what matters is how “happy” the job makes them rather than whether the worker has carpal tunnel syndrome or is subject to sexual harassment, precarity and a host of problems that affect anyone who can’t afford the luxury of lifehacking their happiness as Brooks prescribes.In its characteristically fawning profile of Brooks as “part social scientist, part self-help coach, part motivational speaker, and part spiritual guru”, Politico recently cast his journey as a departure from politics and ideology.“Brooks has undergone one of the more unusual professional transformations that Washington has witnessed in recent decades,” the Beltway news outlet wrote. “His most recent transformation also represents a type of retreat – away from a conservative movement that once held him up as a model of its future.”Brooks himself leans into this assertion, arguing that “I’m not a player in the conservative movement” and adding that his career in the conservative movement “is just not relevant – this stuff isn’t relevant anymore”.But Brooks’ professional trek is less a “transformation” – and less shocking – if one considers that his happiness books are ideological manifestos shrouded in the veil of social science. His new literature is the kind of academia-flavored politics that has long been the central product – and sleight of hand – of the almost $70m thinktank that Brooks ran for a decade. (The AEI still lists Brooks as one of its scholars.)From its origin, the AEI has depicted itself as a staid, nonpartisan, quasi-academic institution, even though it has always been a lobbying front for rightwing forces – a one-stop shop where corporate America can advance its ideological and political interests under the auspices of academic research and policy-shaping.Though not mentioned in the AEI’s official history, President Harry Truman shut down the organization in 1949 because it was illegally operating as a lobbying front for the railroad industry. It falsely called itself an “educational association” while sharing a physical address with a rail lobby. Though the AEI’s donors remain anonymous to this day (a practice frowned upon in the non-profit world for obvious reasons), the donors that have been revealed through reporting include fossil fuel extractors, labor abusers, opioid pushers, dictators, weapons makers and big tech giants – all of which have an interest in shaping US political discourse, under the guise of seemingly nonpartisan empiricism.The bulk of Build the Life You Want is harmless enough, synthesizing sociological and psychological theories and studies from the past 50 years or so, from personality sorting questionnaires to scientifically suspect, but persistently popular, reliance on brain activity research. But Brooks then weaponizes that research and scholarship to create ideological storylines.The book stresses the importance of “earned success”, which is Brooks’ personal conservative spin on “learned helplessness” – a concept popularized in the 1970s by Martin Seligman, the so-called “father of positive psychology”.“Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy,” Brooks writes. “The best way to enjoy earned success is to find ways to get better at your job, whether that leads to promotions and higher pay or not.”Hard work for its own sake will make us happier is a storyline that couldn’t have been better articulated by AEI scholars, who insinuate that Americans’ big problem is their alleged lack of work ethic, not the rapaciousness of the thinktank’s donors.Paraphrasing – or rather, misreading – Viktor Frankl, the author of the 1946 Holocaust memoir and social psychology text Man’s Search for Meaning, Brooks writes that “the common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.”Later, building off Frankl’s works, Brooks repeats a major theme of the book: circumstances aren’t what matter, our response to them is.“You can’t choose your feelings,” Brooks tells us. “But you can choose your reaction to your feelings. What [Frankl] was saying is … If someone you love gets sick, you will be afraid, but you can choose how you express this fear, and how it affects your life.”But if a loved one is sick, the most significant way one can choose how it “affects your life” is if said loved one has quality, inexpensive healthcare – something Brooks spent more than 10 years working to make sure the poor can’t have. What would the average person rather have in the face of an earth-shattering family illness: a squishy life guideline to managing emotions or quality healthcare?Obviously the latter, but for Brooks, only the former is on offer.This “tough it out” ethos is consistent with Brooks’ decades of advocating the evisceration of programs designed to help the poor survive – all to extend “happiness” and prosperity to the masses.“It is a simple fact that the United States is becoming an entitlement state,” he wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed that depicted social security, welfare programs and disability benefits as “impoverishing the lives of the growing millions dependent on unearned resources”.“The good news is that we have a golden opportunity to rein in entitlements,” he said, invoking Washington-speak for reducing social security benefits, which the AEI has proposed. “By reforming entitlements and the tax system instead of extracting more money with higher tax rates, the economy could be reoriented away from unearned transfers to earned wages. This would make the economy fairer and sounder. And in the process it could build a happier country for ourselves and our children.”If it seems deeply cynical to use pop psychology and pop morality of “earning” money and creating “happiness” to argue for lowering taxes for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor, that’s because it is.Brooks now insists he is no longer manufacturing such political opinion, but his old austerity activism shines through in his happiness literature.The most explicit example is in his book From Strength to Strength. As part of a passage headlined “The benefits of weakness, pain, and loss”, Brooks cites Frankl to suggest that a world of hardship may actually be desirable, because people “could find the meaning of their lives, and personal growth, in all kinds of suffering”.Perhaps this explains why Brooks’ new iteration as a happiness guru includes no mea culpa for his past career explicitly advocating for the austerity that sows so much desperation. If suffering is a catalyst for personal growth, then why should he offer contrition?The mystery, then, isn’t why he is so unapologetic and still on this trajectory (answer: it is lucrative). The most vexing question is: why are so many liberals falling for this act?This is a man who is deeply uninterested in – and, indeed, actively hostile to – creating the conditions that allow anyone who isn’t in his class status the capacity to be safe and secure, much less happy, and he is now one of the country’s most prominent gurus for finding “happiness”.For the better part of a decade, Brooks hired and curated the careers of documented racists like Charles Murray, climate denialists like Mark Perry and ”replacement theory” advocates such as JD Vance. Now he’s doing a calm, professorial routine about how we all need to take a practical, science-driven path to being happier?This should be a scandal, but Brooks frames it in the right Atlantic-ese, so most just nod along.For a book about a life well lived, Build the Life You Want is remarkably short on objective discussions of ethics or virtue. All moral content exists entirely inside the head of the reader or the authors’ examples of happy people (what makes you feel inspired, what our subject found fulfilling), with zero discussion about what is objectively virtuous or what can be done as a community rather than as an individual – fitting for a career funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers and heirs to the Walmart fortune.Ultimately, this is where all of these class-flattening, middlebrow self-help discussions of happiness fall apart: they treat “happiness” as the center of the moral universe rather than virtue, which is to say, the politics of maximizing others’ happiness over one’s own in a systematic way, rather than as one-off instances of bourgeois charity.But, of course, serial killers are “happy” murdering, Charles Koch is “happy” extracting profit from low-wage workers, and Saudi dictators are “happy” hosting cocaine-fueled yacht parties and buying soccer teams. So what? Being happy is not inherently good or bad. What matters is building systems of justice, welfare and safety that allow the maximum number of people to be secure and healthy.If granting the average working person rights to a universal basic standard of living ends up creating more happiness, then all the better.But without such foundational rights – rights Brooks has spent his career opposing – what is “happiness” if not an abstract privilege of those who can afford it?
Adam H Johnson is the co-host of the podcast Citations Needed and a writer for the Substack newsletter The Column
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
A version of this article first appeared in the Lever More

The US representative Jim Jordan faced strong opposition to his House speakership bid Tuesday as 20 Republicans voted against him on a first ballot. The chamber adjourned for the day as the Ohio Republican worked to flip some of his detractors his way.It’s the second time in this Congress that the House has faced multiple rounds of voting for speaker, following the protracted struggle in January when Kevin McCarthy won the gavel on the 15th attempt.Twenty GOP lawmakers voted for a candidate other than Jordan, as many protested the removal of McCarthy as speaker earlier this month and the process that has unfolded to replace him.Conservatives have been mounting an intense pressure campaign to persuade the final holdouts to support Jordan, but some of his opponents appear even more determined to stop him from becoming speaker.Jordan will need to flip at least 16 Republicans to become speaker, as Democrats are certain to continue backing their own nominee, the minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Republicans currently control the House 221-212.The House is expected to come back for a second round of voting on Wednesday.Here’s what to know before more voting for speaker:When is the speaker election? And how does it work?The House gaveled into session Tuesday at noon to hold what would be the first of several votes to elect a speaker. It’s a speaker’s election unlike any other following the removal of McCarthy of California, who was unexpectedly ousted from the post after just nine months on the job.Normally the speaker is elected every two years in January, when the House organizes for a new session. A new election can only be held if the speaker dies, resigns or is removed from office.On Tuesday, once the House was in a quorum – meaning a minimum number of members were present to proceed – each party nominated its candidate for speaker. Republicans nominated Jordan. As they did last week against the representative Steve Scalise, Democrats nominated Jeffries and are expected to continue to vote for him.House members remained present during the speakership vote. It’s one of the few times – including during the State of the Union address – that lawmakers are all seated in the chamber.How many votes does it take to elect a speaker?It takes a simple majority of the votes from House members who are present and voting to elect a speaker. There were 432 Democrats and Republicans in attendance during Tuesday’s vote, with one GOP lawmaker absent. Two House seats are currently vacant. That means Jordan or any other Republican candidate needs 217 votes to win.Once the second roll call for speaker begins Wednesday, members of the House will once again call out their choices. The House will vote as many times as necessary until someone wins. Jordan made clear that he was not giving up after the first ballot.“The House needs a speaker as soon as possible,” Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Jordan, said in a statement. “It’s time for Republicans to come together.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s uncertain how many rounds it might take for Jordan to clinch the gavel, but supporters have expressed confidence that the consecutive public floor votes will force holdouts to flip their way. McCarthy narrowly won the speakership in January on the 15th round of balloting, after five excruciating days.Who is supporting and opposing Jordan?Jordan, a darling of the party’s hardline rightwing base, still faces opposition from some members of the conference who doubt his ability to lead.“Being speaker of the House is not being the chairman,” the representative Mario Díaz Balart, one of the holdouts, said Friday. “Because you deal with foreign policy, you deal with the heads of state, you deal with domestic policy and you deal with security issues.”He added: “I think there are a lot of questions about whether he can unify and lead the conference, and whether he can even lead his own people, his closest people.”Some Republicans are upset with how the speaker’s race has played out.Steve Scalise, the majority leader, first won his colleagues’ nomination for speaker last week. Jordan, who came in second, threw his support behind Scalise, stating that he would support his nomination when it came to the floor and urging the rest of the conference to do the same. But more than a dozen Republicans refused, leading Scalise to withdraw a day later.Those same members who refused to back Scalise are now Jordan’s strongest base of support. They spent the weekend publicly and privately lobbying each of his critics to drop their opposition and become a “team player”. They say the party’s grassroots base pressure could prove decisive in the vote.Other Republicans opposing Jordan’s speaker bid come from swing districts and are facing tough re-election races next year. More

While Jim Jordan may not have enough votes to become House Speaker, another round of voting is expected today.A spokesperson for Jordan confirmed to CNN’s Manu Raju that Jordan will force another round of votes.“The House needs a speaker as soon as possible. Expect another round of votes today. It’s time for Republicans to come together,” said Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye.In his bid to become the next speaker, far-right representative Jim Jordan quickly ran into the same problem Kevin McCarthy did during his speakership election in January: the GOP is deeply divided and unable to agree on a leader.Jordan was unable to secure a majority after 20 Republicans voted for another candidate. Jordan will have another try tomorrow, but it’s unclear whether the Ohio congressman has enough clout to sustain multiple rounds of balloting to win the speakership.Democrats meanwhile were united in voting for House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Without any Republican support, Jeffries can’t win the speakership either.
Democrats plan to turn Jordan’s speakership, if he is actually elected, into a campaign issue, by highlighting his extreme positions and arguing there are no moderates in the House GOP.
Calling Republicans the “chaos caucus”, DNC spokesperson Sarafina Chitika accused GOP members of making “a mockery of our institutions” and being “incapable of governing”.
Former speaker Kevin McCarthy was optimistic Jordan would be elected, perhaps even on the first round of votes. He has already turned out to be part wrong.
Remember, Jordan was a “significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, according to the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is heading to Israel to “consult on next steps”, the White House said, as the country prepares for an invasion of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist attacks less than two weeks ago. For the latest on the conflict, follow our blog.
– Guardian staffEr, scratch that. The latest is that Jordan will try to win the speakership again tomorrow. Per House GOP whip Tom Emmer, the House will vote on the speaker tomorrow at 11am.It’s looking like the House may hold another vote this evening, after Jordan supporter Gus Bilirakis returns from a funeral.Representative Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called on the “handful of Republicans who try to portray themselves as reasonable” to step up and work with Democrats.“The dynamics any Republican speaker would face is the same: a slim majority, an empowered Maga wing and a divided government. Jim Jordan did not even get as many votes as Kevin McCarthy’s lowest vote total – and that was with all bullying tactics in full force,” she wrote in a statement.“Republicans simply have not been able to govern and the stakes are high. We have just a month left until the next government funding deadline. Come to the table, work with us, and let’s get real work done.”The heads of MI5 and the FBI have issued an unprecedented joint warning that the threat of a domestic terrorist attack could rise as a result of the crisis in the Middle East.The counter-terror chiefs said Jewish communities and organisations, as well as other groups, may face a heightened danger from lone actors, Hamas militants, and Iran, a supporter of Hamas, on British or US soil.Ken McCallum, the director general of Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, said there was a risk that “self-initiated” individuals who may have been radicalised online might respond in “spontaneous or unpredictable ways” in the UK after the terrorist attacks on Israel and what could become a drawn-out conflict.Speaking before a public summit of intelligence chiefs in California, and seated alongside the FBI director Christopher Wray, McCallum said there was also a danger that terror groups or Iran may step up violent activity and that Jewish individuals or organisations could be targeted by neo-Nazis and Islamists.“There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat, and/or change its shape in terms of what is being targeted, in terms of how people are taking inspiration,” he said.On Monday night, a gunman shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels. The Belgian prosecutor’s office originally said there was no evidence the attack was related to the Israel-Gaza conflict, but on Tuesday a spokesperson said a link was being explored.France was put on its highest level of security alert on Friday after a suspected radical Islamist killed a teacher and injured three others in the north of the country.The incidents come at a time of heightened counter-terror concern, given the scale of violence unleashed by Hamas’s attack on Israel 10 days ago.Wray, the FBI director, said terrorist threats were fast-evolving in the US and that “we cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organisations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil.”Read more:It is unclear how a Jim Jordan speakership will affect US aid to Ukraine and Israel.Far-right Republicans, including Jordan, have argued that aid to Ukraine is taking funds away from domestic security issues. In line with an “America First” principle that Donald Trump touts, the hard right has advocated for a more isolationist foreign policy.Though Democrats and many Republicans still support the idea of sending funds to Kyiv, Jordan could limit what legislation reaches the House flood and therefore impact whether future aid bills are prioritized.The White House and lawmakers are currently considering emergency national security legislation that would send aid to Ukraine as well as Israel, among other things.Jim Jordan is finding support from Republicans for another round of voting on his bid to become House speaker – but not from his allies.Florida’s Mario Diaz-Balart wants the chamber to reconvene and vote again. In the first round of voting earlier today, Diaz-Balart backed majority leader Steve Scalise for House speaker:Jim Jordan is down, but he’s not out yet, and could yet become speaker of the House. From the Guardian’s Sam Levine, Joan E Greve and Lauren Gambino, here’s a rundown of what we know about the Ohio Republican and far-right fixture:As the House gears up to vote for its new speaker, all eyes are on Jim Jordan, a founder of the hard-right Freedom caucus. But while the Ohio congressman and his allies say they will have the votes soon, Jordan also has a long history of controversial views that many of his own party members and constituents are not aligned with.Here are some of the key things to know about Jordan as a politician – and a look into how he might act in the role of speaker.Jordan was closely involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the electionJordan was a “significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, according to the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. As early as November of 2020, he was part of discussions with Trump campaign and White House officials examining whether Mike Pence could overturn the election. Immediately after the election, he met with Trump campaign and White House officials at the campaign’s headquarters to help develop a strategy of repeatedly, and falsely, saying the election was fraudulent, the New York Times reported.On 2 January 2021, Jordan led a conference call with members of Congress and the White House in which they discussed urging Trump supporters to march to the Capitol. The day before the January 6 attack, Jordan texted the then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to pass on advice that Pence should “call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all”.After the violence at the Capitol, Jordan was one of several members of Congress to whom the White House reached out to try to delay counting of electoral votes. He received five calls from Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s closest allies, that night, according to the January 6 committee. The two men spoke at least twice that night. Jordan later said he spoke with Trump on January 6, but could not recall how many times.While Jim Jordan may not have enough votes to become House Speaker, another round of voting is expected today.A spokesperson for Jordan confirmed to CNN’s Manu Raju that Jordan will force another round of votes.“The House needs a speaker as soon as possible. Expect another round of votes today. It’s time for Republicans to come together,” said Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye.New York representative Anthony D’Esposito, who voted against Jordan, released a statement following the first round of votes. In his statement, D’Esposito alluded to concerns that Jordan may not understand the concerns of his district.“I want a Speaker who understands Long Island’s unique needs. Restoring the SALT deduction, safeguarding 9/11 victim support funding, and investing in critical infrastructure are our priorities,” said D’Esposito, who voted for former US representative Lee Zeldin.“I look forward to discussions with candidates.”The DNC released a statement chiding Republicans for failing, once again, to elect a House Speaker.Calling Republicans the “Chaos Caucus”, DNC spokesperson Sarafina Chitika accused GOP members of making “a mockery of our institutions” and being “incapable of governing.”“Serious times demand serious leadership, not the GOP’s MAGA clown show with Trump as its ringleader,” said Chitika, in part.North Carolina representative Wiley Nickel issued a statement calling Jim Jordan a “problem starter” after Jordan failed to gain enough votes to become House speaker.Nickel, a Democrat, emphasized that Jordan remains “Donald Trump’s biggest ally in spreading false claims about the 2020 election” in a statement released shortly after the failed first vote.“I came to Congress because pro-democracy Republicans, Independents, and Democrats made their voices heard in my district,” Nickel said.“My constituents want a House Speaker who can bring Congress together, find common ground, and get things done. During his 16-year tenure in Congress, Jim Jordan has done none of that.Republicans held a floor vote to elect rightwing firebrand Jim Jordan as speaker of the House, and quickly ran into the same problem Kevin McCarthy did during his speakership election in January: the GOP is deeply divided and unable to agree on a leader. Jordan was unable to secure a majority after 20 Republicans voted for other candidates, and the Democrats offered him no support. The Ohio congressman has vowed the press on, much like McCarthy did earlier this year, but it’s unclear if Jordan has enough clout to sustain the 15 rounds of balloting it took McCarthy to secure his election as speaker. We’ll find out in the hours and days to come.Here’s what else has happened today:
Democrats plan to turn Jordan’s speakership, if he is actually elected, into a campaign issue, by highlighting his extreme positions and arguing there are no moderates in the House GOP.
McCarthy was optimistic Jordan would be elected, perhaps even on the first round of votes. He has already turned out to be part wrong.
Matt Gaetz, who orchestrated McCarthy’s removal, backed Jordan for speaker.
After announcing the final vote tally, Patrick McHenry, the acting speaker of the House, gaveled the chamber into recess.Besides GOP nominee Jim Jordan and Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, McHenry listed the others who had received votes in the inconclusive election. These were:
Republican Majority leader Steve Scalise, who received seven votes.
Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, who received six votes.
Former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who received three votes.
California congressman Mike Garcia, who received one vote.
Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer, who received one vote.
Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole, who received one vote.
Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, who received one vote.
It’s a similar, perhaps worse, level of dissent to what McCarthy faced at the start of the year. In his speakership election’s first round of balloting, he received 203 votes, while Jeffries received 212 votes, and other candidates received 19 votes. More

The House of Representatives was unable to elect a new speaker on Tuesday, as the hard-right congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio struggled to win the gavel following the historic ouster of the Republican Kevin McCarthy earlier this month.In the first round of voting, 20 Republicans opposed Jordan, while 200 Republicans supported the judiciary committee chair. The result left Jordan far short of winning the speakership, given that he can only afford four defections within his conference and still capture the gavel. All 212 House Democrats supported Hakeem Jeffries of New York, giving the Democratic leader more votes than Jordan.Speaking to reporters after the vote, Jordan initially indicated Republicans would hold another vote on Tuesday evening, but that plan was scrapped as Jordan’s critics doubled down on their opposition. The House will instead reconvene on Wednesday at 11am to commence the next round of voting, but it remained unclear whether Jordan had a path to victory.In a worrisome sign for Jordan, several of his detractors, led by congressman Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida, called for an immediate second vote on Tuesday, potentially indicating that they believed their ranks were growing. Jordan picked up at least one new supporter, congressman Doug LaMalfa of California, after the first failed vote, but that still left him short of a majority.The deadlock marked only the second time since 1923 that the House has required more than one ballot to elect a speaker; the other recent standoff occurred in January, when McCarthy needed 15 rounds of voting to win the top job.The House has now been without a speaker for two weeks, leaving the chamber paralyzed. The House remains unable to pass any legislation, even as many lawmakers of both parties have stressed the urgent need to approve an aid package for Israel following the recent Hamas attacks.The chair of the House Republican conference, Elise Stefanik of New York, kicked off the session on Tuesday by formally nominating Jordan and encouraging her colleagues to support him. She celebrated Jordan, who is best known for his past clashes with leadership and his staunch support of Donald Trump, as “an America First warrior who wins the toughest of fights”.“We are at a time of great crisis across America, a time of historic challenges in this very chamber,” Stefanik said. “I am reminded of the book of Esther: ‘for such a time as this’. Jim Jordan will be America’s speaker for such a time as this.”Congressman Pete Aguilar of California, chair of the House Democratic caucus, then nominated the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to the speakership, and he warned that Jordan’s ascension would represent a dangerous abdication to “extremism”.“A vote today to make the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier and an insurrection inciter the speaker of this House would be a terrible message to the country and our allies,” Aguilar said.Jordan won the Republican conference’s speakership nomination on Friday, after the House majority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, was forced to drop out of the race due to opposition from hard-right lawmakers. Jordan, who finished second to Scalise in the initial conference vote, secured the nomination in his second attempt, defeating his fellow Republican Austin Scott of Georgia in a vote of 124 to 81.Although he captured the nomination, Jordan’s level of support fell far short of the 217 votes that he will need to win the speakership on Tuesday. Heading into the floor vote, which began at 1pm, it remained unclear whether Jordan had convinced enough of his critics to become speaker. A handful of more moderate Republicans, including Don Bacon of Nebraska and Mike Lawler, continued to insist that they would not support Jordan, and they voted against their conference’s nominee on the first ballot.“I’m not budging,” Bacon said on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday evening. “I’m a five-time commander and deployed to Middle-East four times. I’ll do what is best for country.”Before the session began on Tuesday, Jordan indicated Republicans would keep voting until a new leader is chosen, potentially teeing up another lengthy speakership election. But after the first ballot failed to produce a result, the acting speaker, the Republican Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, announced that the House was in recess. A few hours later, Jordan informed reporters that Republicans would reconvene on Wednesday to resume voting.Jeffries has called on more moderate members of the Republican conference to join with Democrats in forming a bipartisan coalition, but even Jordan skeptics have rejected that proposal, insisting they would not entertain the idea of collaborating with Democrats.If Jordan can win the speakership, Democrats appear ready to use his victory as an example of the extremism that they say has overtaken the Republican party. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ fundraising arm, has circulated a memo to members encouraging them to highlight Jordan’s legislative record, including his vote to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.“A Speaker Jordan means extremism and far-right priorities will govern the House of Representatives,” the memo reads. “It is imperative that our caucus makes clear to voters just how extreme Congressman Jordan is.” More