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      Who are the Republican candidates for House of Representatives speaker?

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      After more than two weeks of failing to choose a speaker, Republicans in the US House plan to reconvene on Monday to begin the process of nominating a third candidate to try to get the 217 votes needed to secure the speakership.So far, Steve Scalise, the No 2 Republican in the House, and Jim Jordan, the far-right congressman, have both failed in their bids.Here’s a look at the nine candidates who signed up to run ahead of a noon deadline Sunday.Tom EmmerEmmer was first elected to the House in 2014 and forms part of the chamber’s leadership. He is the majority whip and responsible for counting and marshaling votes on key issues. He narrowly won that job in 2022 in a closely contested race. Kevin McCarthy, who was removed as speaker on 3 October, has endorsed Emmer’s bid for the post.He previously served as the chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm – the National Republican Congressional Committee – in 2020 and 2022. He helped Republicans win back control of the House in 2022 but won fewer seats than was expected.Emmer also reportedly advised candidates on the campaign trail that year to avoid talking about Trump, according to CNN. Emmer has denied he offered such advice.Donald Trump and his allies are already reportedly marshaling support against Emmer, whom the ex-president has said has not defended him strongly enough. Unlike Scalise and Jordan, Emmer voted to certify the 2020 election, though he signed an amicus brief urging the supreme court to throw out electoral votes from key swing states. He was also one of 39 Republicans who voted to codify federal protections for same-sex marriage.Emmer previously served in the Minnesota legislature for six years and lost the 2010 governor’s race by a razor-thin 9,000 votes.Mike JohnsonThe Louisiana congressman was elected in 2016 and has twice been chosen by his colleagues to serve as vice-chairman of the Republican conference, a leadership position.Johnson helped organize efforts to object to the 2020 election results, getting his House colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief at the supreme court urging the justices to throw out electoral votes from key swing states. The New York Times described him as “the most important architect” of the legal strategy to get members of Congress to object to the electoral college vote. Specifically, Johnson pushed the idea that changes to election rules during the pandemic gave Congress the right to second-guess the election results, the Times reported.A former lawyer for the powerful and anti-LGBTQ+ group Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson is a close ally of Jordan.Kevin HernHern, an Oklahoma congressman, is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a powerful caucus including most GOP members in the House which helps devise conservative policies. Well-known Republicans, including former vice-president Mike Pence, Scalise and Jordan have led the group.He had no political experience before getting elected to Congress in 2018. Previously, he was an aerospace engineer and owned several McDonald’s franchises in Oklahoma. He voted against certifying the 2020 election and signed on to a supreme court brief urging the justices to throw out votes from key swing states.Byron DonaldsA second-term congressman from Florida, Donalds earned 20 votes for speaker across a few of the 15 rounds of voting earlier this year that ultimately resulted in McCarthy winning the speakership.In September, Donalds drew scrutiny when he displayed a purported screenshot at a hearing as part of Republican efforts to impeach Joe Biden that was lacking important context. The image Donalds displayed appeared to be a screenshot of a text message exchange between Hunter and the president’s brother, James Biden. But the content had been edited to omit key passages.He previously served in Florida’s legislature and has picked up support in his speakership bid from other members of the state’s delegation. If chosen by his colleagues, he would be the House’s first ever Black speaker.Austin ScottScott represents Georgia’s eighth congressional district, which stretches from the Florida border to the center of the state. He was first elected in 2010.Scott launched a last-minute bid to challenge Jordan for the House speakership earlier this month but lost. “I care more about the conference and that it’s doing our job than I care about who the speaker is. I truly do,” he said when he launched his previous effort. “If we as Republicans are gonna be the majority, we have to do the right things the right way. And we’re not doing that right now,” he said.Scott signed an amicus brief urging the US supreme court to throw out electoral votes from key swing states but ultimately voted to certify the 2020 election.Jack BergmanBergman, who represents Michigan’s first congressional district, has said he would only serve as speaker until the end of the current congress. “I have no special interests to serve; I’m only in this to do what’s best for our nation and to steady the ship for the 118th Congress,” he said in a statement announcing his candidacy. He voted against certifying the last election and signed on to an amicus brief urging the US supreme court to throw out valid electoral votes.Pete SessionsSessions, a Texas congressman, is the longest-tenured member in the speaker’s race. He served in Congress from 1997 until 2019 and then returned in 2021. He has been the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and the powerful House rules committee.Gary PalmerPalmer has represented Alabama’s 6th congressional district since 2015 and joined the race for speaker shortly before Sunday’s deadline. He is the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, a House leadership position. He was the founding member of the board of directors of the State Policy Network, a group of rightwing thinktanks backed by the Koch brothers and other influential conservatives.He voted to overturn the 2020 election and signed on to an amicus brief asking the supreme court to throw out electoral votes from key swing states.Dan MeuserMeuser is a third-term congressman from Pennsylvania who previously backed Jordan but said he would enter the race if Jordan couldn’t muster enough votes. “I’m considering it because I’m not gonna let this kindergarten continue. I’ll do it,” he told the National Review Online last week after Jordan’s first failed vote.He voted against certifying the 2020 election and signed on to an amicus brief urging the supreme court to throw out valid electoral votes. More

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      Speaker fiasco lays bare ungovernable dysfunction of House Republicans

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      Death threats. Screaming matches behind closed doors. A futile cycle of votes that put internecine warfare on full public display. The Republican party this week sank into new depths of disarray and dysfunction – with no remedy in sight.Never before has America gone so long without a speaker of the House of Representatives and, critics say, not for a very long time has a major party appeared so broken. It has left a branch of the US government leaderless at an extraordinary moment of peril in the Middle East and Ukraine.“When you look at the damage to the party’s image, its reputation, its ability to do anything substantive or serious, this is a week of unmitigated disaster for the Republican party,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy and anti-Trump group.The latest setback came on Friday when Jim Jordan, a rightwing Ohio congressman endorsed by former president Donald Trump, lost a third vote to become speaker and was then unceremoniously dumped by Republicans as their nominee. The majority leader, Steve Scalise, said they were going to “come back and start over” on Monday.This followed a week of turmoil remarkable even by the fractious standards of the Trump era, with ideological disagreements merging with personal vendettas in a combustible mix. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted on 3 October and Scalise failed to garner enough backing, Jordan, a bare knuckle rightwinger and election denier, had made an unlikely effort to unite the party.In the first floor vote on Tuesday, the House Republican conference chair, Elise Stefanik, formally nominated Jordan and aimed high by quoting the Bible (Esther 4:14) to claim that Jordan would be America’s speaker “for such a time as this”. But 20 Republicans holdouts denied him the gavel.A day later, Jordan tried again but this time 22 Republicans opposed him. There was a sense of absurdity as some called out alternative names such as John Boehner, a former speaker who quit eight years ago.Meanwhile it emerged that Jordan’s allies in the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement had deployed a hardball pressure campaign. Every member who voted against him said they had received a barrage of angry phone calls and messages.Congressman Don Bacon said he received death threats and his wife slept with a loaded gun near her bedside one night. Others said their families had been threatened – indicative of dangerously violent undercurrents in American politics that Trump’s recent rhetoric has only encouraged.But the intimidation tactics had the opposite effect of that intended by hardening the resolve of the holdouts. Congressman Drew Ferguson said the death threats against his family were “unacceptable, unforgivable and will never be tolerated”. Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks added: “One thing I cannot stomach or support is a bully.”On Thursday, tragedy turned to farce. Jordan agreed to suspend his campaign in favor of a resolution that would temporarily expand the powers of the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, to get the House moving again. But that went down like a lead balloon at a closed-door meeting of Republicans where tempers flared.McCarthy yelled at Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman behind his ousting, when Gaetz tried to seize a microphone. The former speaker explained to reporters later: “I told him to sit down, and he sat down. I think the entire conference screamed at him. Listen, the whole country, I think, would scream at Matt Gaetz right now.”After the meeting, Jordan announced that the McHenry plan would be scrapped and that he would fight on after all. “I’m still running for speaker,” he declared. “I plan to go to the floor and get the votes and win this race.” But on Friday the opposition grew to 25 Republicans, an election result that not even Jordan could deny.Soon after he lost the party nomination in a secret ballot, putting Republicans back to square one. Critics saw it as the awful spectacle of a party – held together by the glue of grievance, “owning the libs” and a cult of personality – coming apart at the seams.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We are seeing the inevitable outcome of years of neglect, years of lack of leadership, years of lack of courage culminate with what is a completely ungovernable and dysfunctional Republican party. The fact that there isn’t a single Republican right now who can get 217 votes is illustrative of deep schisms within the party and these deep wounds that there is no healing from.”Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Time and again the bad actors in the Republican party have been rewarded for their bad behavior. They get rewarded with television time. They get rewarded with raising millions of dollars in contributions.“They get rewarded with plum committee assignments. Whether it’s Jordan or a Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who time and again we’re told represent the fringe of the party, they continue to be elevated and empowered by the leadership that’s in charge.”Now ending its third week without a leader, the House cannot act on a $106bn national security package unveiled by Joe Biden on Friday that would bolster US border security and send aid to Israel and Ukraine. Congress also faces a 17 November deadline to pass funding to keep the government open.Jeffries has said Democrats are “ready, willing and able” to partner with centrist Republicans on a path to reopen the House. In the meantime the chaos should, in theory, present a campaign gift to Democrats in next year’s elections, contrasting Biden’s steady wartime leadership with a party at war with itself.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “It’s a slow drip. People are still going to work and living their lives so they’re not worried about it. But independent voters who have been uncomfortable with the very right wing of the Republican party, whether it’s Trump or anybody else, will get more uncomfortable because this is threatening the stability of the federal government to function at all.“It’s one thing to be chaotic if you’re Trump – but it’s another to not be able to pass any legislation at all.” More

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      Why do Republicans oppose Jim Jordan as speaker and what’s next?

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      Ever since Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on 3 October, the Republican conference has been mired in chaos. Friday marked an escalation as that dysfunction as Jim Jordan, the far-right congressman from Ohio, lost his third vote on the House floor to be speaker and his status as the GOP nominee.Here’s a look at what transpired this week:How did we get here again?There are currently 221 Republicans and 212 Democrats in the US House (there are two vacancies), giving the GOP a very slim majority. That means that any Republican who wants to be speaker has to have the support of nearly all of the Republicans in the House, something that is increasingly harder since individual members need less institutional support than they did in the past because of politically uncompetitive districts and the ability to raise huge sums of money online.When McCarthy negotiated himself into the speakership earlier this year, one of his key concessions was allowing any House member to file a motion to vacate, or remove him from speaker. Representative Matt Gaetz, a far-right Republican from Florida, filed such a motion earlier this month and enough Republicans – eight in total – voted against McCarthy to oust him.That vacancy essentially brought the House to a standstill. The speaker runs the business of the House and controls the floor schedule and which bills come to the floor. Without one, the House cannot operate.After McCarthy’s ouster, Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jordan entered the speaker’s race. Scalise won a private vote among the Republican conference, but withdrew his name from contention after it became clear he could not get enough votes.What happened with Jim Jordan this week?Jordan, a far-right Ohio Republican who co-founded the House Freedom Caucus, earned the nomination to be the conference’s next speaker on 13 October. He won the nomination with 124 of the House Republican conference’s 221 votes. In order to become speaker he needed to get 217 votes from all house members.Things went from bad to worse when Jordan went to the House floor for formal votes on his speakership. On Tuesday, 20 Republicans voted against him, putting him far below the threshold he needed to be speaker. Twenty-two Republicans voted against him in a second vote on Wednesday. Twenty-five Republicans opposed him in a third vote, putting him even further from the speakership.After the third failed vote, Republicans took a vote by secret ballot on whether Jordan should remain the nominee. He lost that vote handily, losing his status as the Republican nominee for speaker.New Republican candidates can now declare next week, when Republicans will start the process all over again.Why did Republicans oppose Jordan?Several of the members who are opposed to Jordan are members of the House appropriations committee, who are reportedly opposed to the way Jordan has embraced a hard line on spending cuts and shutting down the government.Members also reported receiving death threats and outside pressure to vote for Jordan, a position that has only hardened their opposition to him. “The last thing you want to do is try to intimidate or pressure me, because then I close out entirely,” Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican who opposes Jordan, told reporters earlier this week.There is also reportedly bad blood over the way Jordan and his allies treated Steve Scalise. Scalise previously beat Jordan to win the conference’s nomination to be speaker, but withdrew his bid after it became clear he couldn’t get enough votes to win in the House. Some Scalise allies think Jordan didn’t do enough to rally Republicans around Scalise.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He missed his moment of leadership when he failed Steve Scalise,” John Rutherford, a Florida congressman who voted against Jordan, said earlier this week.What happens next?No one knows. Even as it was clear that Jordan had no clear path to becoming the speaker, no Republican emerged to seriously challenge him. Republicans currently have a Sunday noon deadline to announce their candidacy ahead of another round of speakership talks.Who is Patrick McHenry and what is the speaker pro tempore?After Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, became the speaker pro tempore. McCarthy chose McHenry to take on that role should the speakership ever be declared vacant.There has never been a similar situation, so it’s unclear exactly what the scope of McHenry’s power is. It has been widely understood to be extremely narrow so far, limited to the authority to oversee a vote for the next speaker. As Republicans stalled in picking a new speaker, there has been chatter about temporarily expanding McHenry’s power so that the House can conduct some limited business. The majority of the GOP conference seems opposed to that kind of action.Could Democrats cut a deal with Republicans on a new speaker?Democrats have all voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, in each of the speakership elections. Jeffries has said there have been “informal talks” with Republicans, but Democrats have been quiet about any negotiations. A pre-condition for any Democratic support for a speaker appears to be that they would allow any bipartisan bills come up for a vote. More

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      Jim Jordan forced out of House speaker race after losing secret ballot

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      Jim Jordan of Ohio was forced out of the House speakership race on Friday after his Republican colleagues voted against his continued bid for the seat in a secret ballot after his third failed attempt to corral enough support to win the gavel.Jordan’s lost bid followed a contentious week on Capitol Hill, during which he and his allies attempted to cajole more moderate Republicans into backing Jordan.After his loss, Jordan told reporters he was “going to go back to work” and that it was “time to unite”.It is not clear who Republicans could elevate as a next nominee. There’s a deadline of Sunday at noon for candidates to announce interest in the speakership. The conference is expected to return on Monday evening to hear from candidates for the speakership, with voting set for Tuesday. By that time, the House will have been without a speaker for three weeks, hamstrung on conducting the work they were elected to do.Some moderates want to see a consensus candidate, while the far-right flank that ousted former speaker Kevin McCarthy previously said they would be “prepared to accept censure, suspension or removal from the conference” to get Jordan the speakership.A handful of Republican House members have either said they’ll seek the speakership or are considering the idea. Most prominent among them is Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, currently the majority whip, the No 3 Republican in the chamber, who has McCarthy’s backing. Others in the mix include Oklahoma’s Kevin Hern, Georgia’s Austin Scott, Florida’s Byron Donalds, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson and Michigan’s Jack Bergman.In the first floor vote of the speakership election, on Tuesday, 20 House Republicans opposed Jordan, leaving him far short of the 217 votes needed to capture the top job. Because of Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House, Jordan could only afford four defections within his conference and still ascend to the speakership.Even as Jordan tried to assuage moderates’ concerns, a second floor vote held on Wednesday revealed that opposition had only grown, as 22 Republicans opposed Jordan’s candidacy. By the third vote, on Friday, Jordan lost more support, with 25 House Republicans voting against him.As long as the House remains without a speaker, the chamber cannot advance any legislation, leaving members unable to pass critical bills like a stopgap government funding measure or an aid package for Israel and Ukraine. Government funding is set to run out in less than a month, raising the threat of a federal shutdown next month.Jordan’s announcement came two weeks after the historic ouster of McCarthy, after eight House Republicans joined Democrats in supporting a motion to vacate the chair. Following McCarthy’s removal, the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, initially won his conference’s nomination for speaker, but he dropped out of the race last week due to entrenched opposition among hard-right lawmakers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs of Friday, it remained unclear how Republicans could end the standoff and resume the business of the House. One idea floated by centrist Democrats and embraced by some of Jordan’s critics involved expanding the powers of the acting speaker, the Republican Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, but the plan fizzled. Such a solution would raise serious constitutional questions, as the powers of an acting speaker are murky.With Republicans embroiled in conflict, the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, has repeatedly called for the creation of a bipartisan governing coalition between Democrats and more moderate Republicans. Even Jordan’s staunchest opponents have rejected the idea of teaming up with Democrats, although that could change if the House remains at a standstill.On Friday, Jeffries, who has received the most votes in the speakership votes but would not be able to get enough support to take the spot since Democrats are in the minority, called on his Republican colleagues to get to work. “Embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism,” Jeffries said. More

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      What the Republican Votes Against Jim Jordan Mean

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      “Is this a crack in the MAGA armor?” a reader asks.To the Editor:Re “Jordan Loses Secret Ballot to Remain G.O.P. Nominee for Speaker” (nytimes.com, Oct. 20):Although Representative Jim Jordan does not have the reputation for being a consensus builder, it appears, with his losing yet another vote to become House speaker, he has fostered a coalition against himself that combines experienced legislators, principled conservatives and what passes these days for moderate Republicans, especially those representing congressional districts that President Biden won in 2020.But what may well be the glue holding these factions together is the prospect of the tone of a Jordan speakership. Reports of intimidating phone-call campaigns to congressional offices, as well as threats of primary challenges directed at those Republicans withholding their votes from Mr. Jordan, may have solidified the opposition to him.Opposite of what his allies intended, these efforts in defense of Mr. Jordan may have triggered fears of the hard-edge tactics that could become common in a Jordan speakership. Mr. Jordan appears to be the victim of what amounts to a political autoimmune response from a decisive part of the House body.Chuck CutoloWestbury, N.Y.The writer formerly worked on Capitol Hill, including as legislative director for Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.To the Editor:I cannot help but to think (optimistically) that the failure of Jim Jordan’s speaker bid is a proxy for the 2024 presidential election.It appears that a small, but growing, number of Republican representatives have finally discovered their backbones and are rejecting election denial and insurrection promotion as anti-democracy ideas. Further, they are no longer succumbing to threats and blackmail from within their ranks. Finally, they seem to be seeking leaders with integrity.Is this a crack in the MAGA armor? Are we getting back to the real business of our elected officials? Is the nightmare nearly over? We can only hope.Steve SaxtonMinneapolisTo the Editor:Re “Finger-Pointing and Vocal Jabs, but No Speaker” (front page, Oct. 20):The Times has it exactly backward when it refers to the 22 Republican members of Congress who opposed Jim Jordan’s candidacy for speaker of the House in Wednesday’s vote as “mainstream” Republicans.The 199 Republican members of Congress who voted for Mr. Jordan, a man whom former Speaker John Boehner described as a “legislative terrorist,” represent the G.O.P. mainstream. The 22 who opposed Mr. Jordan are the outliers.In today’s G.O.P., the radical and the reactionary have become the mainstream.Richard KaveshNyack, N.Y. More

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      Jim Jordan loses third House speaker vote as Republican holdouts reach 25

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      The far-right congressman Jim Jordan lost a third consecutive bid for speaker on Friday, failing to overcome entrenched opposition from a widening group of Republican holdouts, some of whom say they have received death threats for blocking his ascent to the gavel.With the House leaderless for an 18th day, Jordan, a founder of the ultra-conservative House Freedom caucus and hard-charging ally of Donald Trump who led the congressional effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, won 194 votes, well shy of the majority needed to be elected speaker.In a troubling sign for Jordan, 25 Republicans voted against his nomination, three more than in the second vote and five more than in his first failed effort. All Democrats rallied behind their party’s leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who received 210 votes.Earlier on Friday, Jordan indicated that he was prepared to plough through several more rounds of balloting, noting that it took the former Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, 15 rounds to claim the gavel. Following the third vote on Friday, Republicans were planning to retreat once again behind closed doors to chart their next steps.Nominating Jordan for the job, McCarthy nodded to the chaos engulfing House Republicans. “Being speaker is not an easy job, especially in this conference,” he said, drawing some laughs in the chamber. But he urged the group he once led to set aside their objections and grievances and vote for Jordan: “I know he is ready for the job.”Congresswoman Kathleen Clark, the No 2 House Democrat, then nominated Jeffries to the speakership, warning that Jordan was a “true threat to our democracy and our constitution”.“It is not too late for the majority to choose a bipartisan path forward to reopen the House,” she said.The speaker’s chair has been empty since a cadre of hardline Republicans ousted McCarthy at the start of the month, a first in American history. Without a speaker, the immobilized chamber has been unable to conduct legislative business as wars rage in Europe and the Middle East and a government shutdown looms unless Congress passes a federal funding bill before mid-November.The White House on Friday sent a sprawling package to Congress, requesting more than $105bn in funding to, among other things, aid Ukraine and Israel and address rising numbers of migrants entering the country without authorization at the US-Mexico border.At a brief press conference on Friday morning, Jordan attempted to rally his conference behind him with remarks that placed his quest to win the speakership alongside American achievements like taking flight and landing on the moon.“The fastest way to get to work for the American people is to elect a speaker so the House can be open and we can get things done,” Jordan said on Friday morning.After three failed votes in which Jordan saw his opposition widen, additional rounds of balloting were not expected to break the impasse. A number of the holdouts have expressed their outrage at the hardball tactics employed by Jordan’s allies to win over their votes, which has devolved into harassing calls and even death threats against lawmakers and their families.“One thing I cannot stomach or support is a bully,” said a statement from the congresswomanMariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican, who switched her vote against Jordan on a second ballot after receiving “credible death threats”.With no end in sight to the present situation on Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed a plan to expand the authority of the interim speaker, a position currently held by Patrick McHenry of North Carolina. Jordan briefly backed the proposal as a way to allow Congress to return to its work while he continued to campaign for the post that is second in line to the presidency.But a group of hard-right conservatives revolted, calling the plan “asinine” and arguing that it would in effect cede control of the floor to Democrats. Jordan dropped the idea and vowed to fight on.Republican infighting reached a boiling point this week as lawmakers vented their frustration and traded accusations of who was to blame for plunging the party – and the chamber – into chaos.The bitter feud over Jordan’s speakership bid has pitted an assorted coalition of political moderates and institutional pragmatists against the pugnacious chair of the judiciary committee. The Ohio Republican has relied on an endorsement from Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, and support from the party’s conservative grassroots to pressure them to fall in line behind him.Concerns about a Jordan speakership vary. Some fear his combative brand of politics will make it harder for Republicans to defend their House majority in the 2024 elections, while others believed the challenges facing the country and the world were too great to hand the gavel to a lawmaker one former Republican speaker branded a “legislative terrorist”.Jordan’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden has also cost him the vote of at least one Republican lawmaker, Ken Buck, a conservative from Colorado.Asked on Friday whether he believes the 2020 election was stolen, Jordan replied: “I think there were all kinds of problems with the 2020 election.”In the narrowly divided House, Jordan would need the support of nearly every Republican in the conference to claim the gavel. In a second ballot on Wednesday, Jordan also lost ground, with 22 Republicans voting against him, two more than on the first ballot.Late on Thursday, Jordan met with his detractors. At the press conference, he characterized the conversation as “good” but it was clear he remained far off from winning the 217 votes needed to become speaker.Following a meeting with Jordan, the congressman Mike Lawler, a New York Republican opposed to Jordan, called for the conference to reinstate McCarthy or empower McHenry.“We must prove to the American people that we can govern effectively and responsibly or, in 15 months, we’ll be debating who the minority leader is and preparing for Joe Biden’s second inaugural,” he said. More

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      The Deep Roots of Republican Dysfunction

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      The collapse of the House Republican majority into chaos is the clearest possible evidence that the party is off the rails.Of course, the Republican Party has been off the rails for a while before now. This was true in 2010, when Tea Party extremists swept through the party’s ranks, defeating more moderate Republicans — and pretty much any other Republican with an interest in the actual work of government — and establishing a beachhead for radical obstructionism. It was true in 2012, when many Republican voters went wild for the likes of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in the party’s presidential primary, before settling on the more conventionally presidential Mitt Romney. But even then, Romney reached out to Donald Trump — famous, politically speaking, for his “birther” crusade against President Barack Obama — for his blessing, yet another sign that the Republican Party was not on track.The truth of the Republican Party’s deep dysfunction was obvious in 2013, when congressional Republicans shut down the government in a quixotic drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and it was obvious in 2016, when Republican voters nominated Trump for president. Everything that has followed, from the rise of influencer-extremist politicians like Representative Lauren Boebert to the party’s complicity in insurrectionist violence, has been a steady escalation from one transgression to another.The Republican Party is so broken that at this point, its congressional wing cannot function. The result is that this period is now the longest the House of Representatives has been in session without a speaker. And as Republican voters gear up to nominate Trump a third time for president, the rest of the party is not far behind. The only question to ask, and answer, is why.One popular answer is Donald Trump who, in this view, is directly responsible for the downward spiral of dysfunction and deviancy that defines today’s Republican Party. It’s his success as a demagogue and showman that set the stage for the worst of the behavior we’ve seen from elected Republicans.The problem, as I’ve already noted, is that most of what we identify as Republican dysfunction was already evident in the years before Trump came on the scene as a major figure in conservative politics. Even Trump’s contempt for the legitimacy of his political opponents, to the point of rejecting the outcome of a free and fair election, has clear antecedents in conservative agitation over so-called voter fraud, including efforts to raise barriers to voting for rival constituencies.Another popular answer is that we’re seeing the fruits of polarization in American political life. And it is true that within both parties, there’s been a marked and meaningful move away from the center and toward each side’s respective flank. But while the Democratic Party is, in many respects, more liberal than it has ever been, it’s also not nearly as ideologically uniform as the Republican Party. Nor does a rigid, doctrinaire liberalism serve as a litmus test among Democratic voters in Democratic Party primaries outside of a small handful of congressional districts.Joe Biden, for example, is the paradigmatic moderate Democrat and, currently, the president of the United States and leader of the Democratic Party, with ample support across the party establishment. And in Congress, there’s no liberal equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus: no group of nihilistic, obstruction-minded left-wing lawmakers. When Democrats were in the majority, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was a reliable partner of President Biden’s and a constructive force in the making of legislation. If the issue is polarization, then it seems to be driving only one of our two parties toward the abyss.Helpfully, the extent to which the Democratic Party still operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. In 1994, around 33 percent of Republicans called themselves “moderate” and 58 percent said they were “conservative.” There were even, at 8 percent, a few Republican liberals. Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. Outside a handful of environments, found in largely Democratic states like Maryland and Massachusetts, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition geared toward a set of policies — aimed at either regulating or tempering the capitalist economy or promoting the inclusion of various groups in national life. The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment.There have always been ideological movements within American political parties. The Republican Party was formed, in part, by adherents to one of the most important ideological movements of the 19th century — antislavery. But, as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the past decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters for Republican politicians is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment. And if conservatism means aggrieving your enemies, then the obvious choice for the nation’s highest office is the man who hates the most, regardless of what he believes.The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade — nothing to temper the instincts of politicians who would rather shut down the government than accept that a majority of Congress passed a law over their objections, or who would threaten the global economy to get spending cuts they could never win at the ballot box.Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite: There is a whole infrastructure of ideologically motivated money and media that works to push Republican voters and politicians farther to the right.It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.It’s hard to imagine what that might be. It can’t come soon enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Jim Jordan Doesn’t Know What Courage Is

      by

      It’s hard to overstate the extent to which our nation’s absurd Jim Jordan moment encapsulates the deep dysfunction of the political right in the United States.There’s of course all the chaos and incompetence of the Trumpist Republican Party, on display for the world to see. An extremist faction of the House deposed their own party’s speaker of the House without a successor, and now — in the midst of multiplying international crises — the House is rudderless. In fact, it’s worse than rudderless. As I write this newsletter it’s in a state of utter confusion.But there’s also a deeper reality at play here, one that goes well beyond simple incompetence. The Republican base admires Jordan because it thinks he is tough. It perceives him as a man of courage and strength. He is not. Instead, he is a symbol of the way in which Trumpist Republicans have corrupted the concept of courage itself.To understand what courage is supposed to be, I turn to a definition from C.S. Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” It’s a beautiful formulation, one that encompasses both the moral and physical realms and declares that courage is inseparable from virtue.Lewis’s definition presents us with the sobering realization that we don’t truly know if we possess a virtue unless and until it is tested. We can believe we’re honest, but we won’t know we’re truly honest unless we have the courage to tell the truth when the truth will cost us something we value. We can believe we’re brave, but we don’t know if we are until we show it when we face a genuine physical risk.When I meet a virtuous person, I also know that I’m meeting a person of real courage. A lifetime of virtue is impossible absent courage. Conversely, when I see a person consumed with vice, I also know that I’m likely in the presence of a coward, a person whose commitments to virtue could not survive the tests of life.Now contrast the Lewis vision of courage with the courage or toughness lionized on the MAGA right. From the beginning of the Trump era, the entire concept of courage was divorced from virtue and completely fused with two terrible vices: groveling subservience and overt aggression.The subservience, of course, is to the demands of Donald Trump, the right-wing media or the angry Republican base. The command is clear: Do what we say. Hate who we hate. But how can anyone think that such obedience equals courage? Because in this upside-down world, aggression is equated with toughness and bullying is exalted as bravery.Few politicians personify this distortion of courage into cowardice better than Jim Jordan, and it is a sign of the decline of the Republican Party that he was even considered for the speaker’s chair, much less a few votes away from becoming the most powerful Republican elected official in the nation, second in line to the presidency.Is there anything that qualifies him for the position other than his subservience and aggression? His legislative record is extraordinarily thin. As Aaron Blake meticulously documented in The Washington Post, during Jordan’s 16 years in Congress, he hasn’t passed a single bill of his own. According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, he’s consistently one of the least effective members of the entire Republican Party.What is Jim Jordan good at, exactly? He’s a Donald Trump apologist, a performative pugilist and a Fox News fixture. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America collected data showing that as of this month, Jordan had been on Fox 565 times since August 2017, including 268 appearances in weekday prime time. In a party that now prizes performance over policy, each of these Fox appearances builds his résumé far more than legislation ever could.But for sheer subservient aggression, nothing matches his enthusiastic participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The final report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol calls him a “significant player” in Trump’s scheme.As the committee records, “On Jan. 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump and other members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the Jan. 6 joint session.” On Jan. 5, “Jordan texted Mark Meadows, passing along advice that Vice President Pence should ‘call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’” He spoke to Trump at least twice on Jan. 6 itself and voted against certifying the election results, even after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. In 2022 he defied a select committee subpoena.Never forget that this reckless aggression was all in service of some of the most absurd conspiracy theories and legal arguments in modern American political history. All the Republicans who voted against certifying the presidential election were the very definition of cowards. When the virtue of integrity reached its testing point, they collapsed. But bizarrely enough, they often collapsed with a swagger, casting themselves as tough even as they capitulated to the demands of a corrupt president and a frenzied mob.That MAGA aggression has spilled over to the speaker fight itself. As The Times reported on Saturday, “lawmakers and activists” close to Jordan “have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.”The pressure campaign includes Sean Hannity, a Fox prime-time host and wannabe Republican kingmaker. Representatives from his show sent messages to Republican holdouts transparently designed to pressure them into voting for Jordan. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that the pressure campaign even reached the wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. She received personal text messages threatening Bacon’s career, including a message that said: “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is.”On Wednesday afternoon, the pressure campaign began to reach its inevitable conclusion: death threats. Steve Womack of Arkansas told The Washington Post that his staff has been “cussed out” and “threatened.” Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa issued a statement claiming that she’d received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after she voted against Jordan.Roughly 30 minutes after Miller-Meeks’s statement, Jordan finally condemned threats against his colleagues. By then, however, it was too late to repair the damage. Eight years into the MAGA era, Republicans should know exactly what happens when they launch a public pressure campaign. Threats follow MAGA pressure like night follows day.I’ve written a series of newsletters on the culture of MAGA America, including how it combines rage and joy to build community, how it exploits civic ignorance to denigrate its opponents, how its corruption is contagious and how it fosters and feeds a dark caricature of working-class values that warps its populist base. Even so, few elements of right-wing political culture are more toxic than the way it turns vice into virtue and derides the very idea of character in politics.But all is not lost. Just as key conservative jurists joined with their liberal counterparts to reject Trump’s absurd election challenges, key Republican leaders refused to bend the knee to the mob on Jan. 6. And it was conservative lawyers who blew the whistle on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s corruption. A remnant of courageous Republicans stood against Jim Jordan’s campaign for speaker of the House and twice rejected his bid.They did more than reject Jordan. They directly rejected the MAGA bullies Jordan unleashed. As Aaron Blake reported, several Republican members of Congress have directly condemned the tactics of the MAGA right. Representatives Steve Womack of Arkansas, Kay Granger of Texas, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Carlos Giménez of Florida and Miller-Meeks have all denounced the pressure campaign. And John Rutherford of Florida blamed Jordan directly for the threats and acts of intimidation. He told The Washington Post’s Jaqueline Alemany that Jordan’s “absolutely responsible for it” and that “nobody likes to have their arm twisted.”Their courage wasn’t wasted. On Thursday morning, The Times reported that Jordan wouldn’t immediately seek a third floor vote. Instead, he would “endorse a plan to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina” to act as a temporary speaker until Jan. 3. At the same time, however, Jordan wasn’t exactly standing down. Under his plan, he’d continue to act as “speaker designee,” which would permit him to continue whipping votes for his speaker bid, a preposterous idea that would undermine the temporary speaker every day that Jordan worked to sit in his chair.Maybe Jordan realized it was preposterous, too. By the afternoon, he was back to offering himself for a third House vote on the speakership.I’m grateful for the stand of a few stalwart Republicans. But their small number is one reason I remain profoundly concerned. We’ve watched pressure campaigns work on the right for eight long years, until the people who continue to resist dwindled to an ever-smaller minority — a minority strong enough to help block the worst excesses of the MAGA G.O.P. but far too weak to cleanse the Republican Party of its profound moral rot.The battle over the next speaker is yet another proxy fight for the soul of the American right, and the fact that a man like Jim Jordan has come so close to such extraordinary power is proof that the rot runs deep. Only a very small minority of elected Republicans have passed the test. Signs of courage remain, but as long as men like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump run the G.O.P., the bullies still reign. More