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As recently as a few hours ago, Rep. Jim Jordan was prepared to accept a plan he did not like. After two failed votes on his bid for House speaker, and facing poor prospects, the far-right House Judiciary Committee chairman eyed an off-ramp.
Under the plan Jordan was willing to endorse, the House would empower acting Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry until early January. This would, among other things, allow the chamber to function, vote on legislation, prevent a government shutdown, etc. It wasn’t ideal, but with the Ohio Republican’s backing, this appeared to be a solution that would, at least temporarily, limit some of the GOP-imposed chaos on Capitol Hill.
Three hours later, the plan was dead. NBC News reported:
Jordan told reporters this afternoon that GOP members decided a resolution to empower McHenry “wasn’t where we’re going to go.” .... “We made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get back to work. We decided that wasn’t where we’re going to go,” Jordan said.
The congressman added that, despite this week’s failures, he’s still running for speaker, and he still intends to “win this race.”
There’s no great mystery as to why Jordan reversed course between the late-morning and the early-afternoon: A whole lot of House Republicans told the would-be speaker that they really hated this idea.
In fact, what’s left of the House GOP leadership — Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik — all announced their opposition to the plan to empower McHenry on a temporary basis.
They had plenty of company. Over the course of the day, I had trouble keeping up with the number of conservative House members condemning the idea with varying degrees of apoplexy.
Usually, congressional Republicans join the leadership, and then their members start rejecting their plans and ideas. Jim Jordan hasn’t made it to the leadership, and GOP members are already rejecting his plans and ideas.
As for where this leaves us, Jordan does not appear to have the votes to become speaker. Jordan also does not appear to have the votes to empower McHenry with the authorities of a temporary acting speaker. There are Republicans preparing possible speaker candidacies of their own, but they’re waiting for Jordan to get out of the way, and for the time being, he doesn’t want to.
All the while, Jordan’s GOP opponents are getting death threats, and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy desperately wants gullible people to think the Republicans’ chaos should be blamed on Democrats.
What’s next? No one seems to have any idea.