Rep. Jim Jordan isn’t making a third attempt to become speaker of the House on Thursday, but that doesn’t mean the Republican chaos is at an end. The far right is up in arms about the plan to temporarily expand Rep. Patrick McHenry’s powers as speaker pro tempore, Jordan will remain waiting in the wings for another try at speaker in January, and a large majority of Republicans did already cast two votes for an extremist with the thinnest possible legislative record.
It’s not a great look for the party—as some Republicans are well aware.
“It hurts the country; it hurts the Congress; it’s hurting our party,” Rep. Don Bacon told The New York Times. “It’s putting us in a bad hole for next November.” Bacon, who represents a Nebraska district won by President Joe Biden in 2020 and voted against Jordan both times, said he believes some of his fellow Republicans “want to be in the minority,” adding, “I think they would prefer that. So they can just vote no and just yell and scream all the time.”
“There’s no way we win the majority if the message we send to the American people is we believe in the election was stolen, and we believe that Jan. 6 was a tour of the Capitol,” said Rep. Ken Buck, another of the Republicans who opposed Jordan.
New polling from Navigator Research, conducted after Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker but before voting on Jordan’s candidacy started, finds Republicans with their lowest approval rating since taking control of the House:
For the first time, Republicans hold a net negative view of Republicans in Congress (net -4; 45 percent approve – 49 percent disapprove; a net negative 23-point shift since early September). Americans overall also disapprove of Republicans in Congress by a 43-point margin (26 percent approve – 69 percent disapprove), including over four in five Democrats (86 percent disapprove) and three in four independents (72 percent disapprove). Disapproval is equally high among moderate Americans (net -47; 22 percent approve – 69 percent disapprove) and among Republicans who describe themselves as not very conservative, Republicans in Congress have double-digit net negative ratings (net -17; 38 percent approve – 55 percent disapprove).
McCarthy and Jordan were both under water on approval as individuals, as were Rep. Matt Gaetz and Majority Leader Steve Scalise. Among the 72% of people who said they’d heard something negative about Republicans in the past few days, a majority pointed to “House” and “speaker” as the sources of the negative news. The continuing drama is not the way to regain ground—but neither is putting a bomb-thrower like Jordan in control.
For once, a significant number of the Republicans complaining that their party was being too extremist actually voted in accordance with their public misgivings. They’ve fallen in line on a lot of things, but not when it came to making Jordan the speaker. A large majority of House Republicans did vote for Jordan, though, and it’s not like he’s going away. They’re going to keep calling Jordan the “speaker-designate” even though they’ve shown they can’t designate squat. He’s likely to keep yelling and posturing for the cameras whenever possible, because that’s who he is. And supporting him is the majority position of House Republicans, even as he loses.
Some Jordan allies, like Rep. Jim Banks, see doing anything but doubling down on speaker votes as the truly disastrous course. According to Banks, expanding McHenry’s powers is a “historic betrayal to our Republican voters.”
“And what they’re doing right now is walking the Republicans off the plank,” he told The Washington Post’s Marina Alfaro. “We don’t deserve the majority. We go along with the plan to give the Democrats control over the House of Representatives. It is a giant betrayal.”
Democrats are ready to take advantage in 2024, which is good news for the future. But make no mistake: This extremist, ruthless, anti-democratic Republican Party is terrible for the nation. Chaos should not be good news, but when it’s the only thing keeping Republicans from dragging the country down further, it can look like our best hope.
Laura Clawson
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