Jim Jordan

Jonathan Bernstein, Tribune News Service

The first nine months of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives have been chaotic, ugly and ineffective. Could it get any worse? Yes. If Republicans follow the advice of former President Donald Trump and elect Representative Jim Jordan as the next speaker of the House, the odds are that things will get a lot worse. It’s not just that the Ohio congressman is among the chamber’s most extreme conservatives, or that as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee he seems obsessed with Hunter Biden and impeaching President Joe Biden. Yes, those are divisive issues — even among Republicans — that would create problems for him as speaker.

As speaker he needs to be able to manage his own party and deal with Democrats. It’s a partisan job, but extreme partisans who have held the position previously have found ways to work with the other party within the chamber, in the Senate, and when necessary, in the White House. The question is whether Jordan is equipped to do those things, and from what we know the answer is that he almost certainly isn’t. One might suppose that the kinds of skills that worked for previous capable speakers, such as Tip O’Neill, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, would no longer matter in Trump’s Republican Party. But the House is still the House, and the truth is that the factionalised and dysfunctional House Republicans are in need now more than ever of leadership that knows the basics: how to count votes, how to work with party factions to reach consensus, how to negotiate with Senate leaders on behalf of the entire party so that the deals they’ve made hold once they’re on the House floor for votes.

We saw with Kevin McCarthy the chaos that results when the leadership team can’t do those things — careening from crisis to crisis, unable to pass even messaging bills at times and utterly incapable of turning bills into law. We’re less than six weeks from another shutdown showdown, and having a party leader who is even more dedicated to confrontation isn’t going to make it any easier to keep the government open. Partisan bluster may keep up the ratings on Fox News, but the bottom line remains that bills don’t pass into law unless both chambers of Congress vote for them and the president signs them. Jordan has basically zero training in what’s needed to keep the lights on and get stuff done. He’s never served in leadership. To put it bluntly, he hasn’t been a legislator during his time in the House. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on oversight, but it simply isn’t training for how to turn bills into laws. Even worse, Jordan’s particular style of oversight is basically working with Republican-aligned media to propagate dubious scandal allegations and conspiracy theories. He’s never been one to care much about what anyone outside of the conservative closed information feedback loop was thinking. Whatever one thinks of that, it’s unlikely to be helpful in an actual governing job where real work needs to get done.

More broadly, being a strong media presence turns out to be one of the least important skills for a speaker. Paul Ryan had excellent media skills, but they didn’t help him much during his short tenure in the job. The same with Newt Gingrich, who also found that being media-savvy doesn’t keep the press from turning on you when things go bad. O’Neill, Boehner and Pelosi ranged from mediocre to downright bad at handling the media, but they also all understood that a big part of the job is to take incoming fire if that’s what’s needed to protect the more vulnerable members of the party. McCarthy never got that and it’s hard to see anything in Jordan’s background that has taught him that lesson. Beyond scandal-mongering, his chief contribution in the House as a former chair of the House Freedom Caucus is as a factional leader. The skills developed for that aren’t likely to transfer well to whole-party leadership, especially given that much of the Republican conference is livid about how Congressman Matt Gaetz and other Freedom Caucus members (excluding Jordan) took down McCarthy.