Every day there is a new Republican tragedy in Congress.
Unable to rally enough elected officials from his party in the last days to become the new president of the House of Representatives, the deputy from Ohio, Jim Jordan is not yet throwing in the towel and announced Thursday that he will submit to a new vote by the deputies. Rather than supporting the strengthening of the powers of the interim president, Patrick T. McHenry, to try to get the institution out of the crisis.
The aspiring “speaker” still hopes to be able to convince around twenty elected officials from his camp, resistant to the idea of seeing him access the highest seat within the American legislative power, to vote for him. Which they refused to do twice this week, thus keeping the House in the impasse it was plunged into following the historic impeachment of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month. But his quest remains difficult due to the great threat that this loyalist of Donald Trump and accomplice of the ex-president in his attacks against the American electoral system, now poses to the future of the country.
“Jim Jordan was identified by the Commission of Inquiry into the January 6 Insurrection as an “important actor” in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 elections, noted political scientist Jake Grumbach in an interview with Le Devoir. from the University of California at Berkeley. The closer he tries to get to the presidency of the House of Representatives, the more worrying it becomes for American democracy and the rule of law.”
We remember: harangued by the populist after his poorly digested defeat, Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the American Congress on January 6, 2021 in the hope of stopping the legislative process certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The investigation into this attack revealed that Jim Jordan participated in discussions in November 2020 aimed at convincing then-Vice President Mike Pence to “reject” the vote cast in favor of the Democrats.
Four days before the insurrection, he also held a conference call with members of Congress and White House officials to plan the supporters’ march on the Capitol. Jim Jordan was in close communication on the day of the tragedy with Mark Meadows, former chief of staff of Donald Trump, but also with the lawyer of Trumpism, Rudy Giuliani, to ensure that the crowd movement led to the maintenance of the populist in power, against the will of the ballot box.
He is one of the Republican elected officials who believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president. He supports the conspiracy theory of a stolen electoral vote. And inevitably, all these stains on his roadmap could dirty the seat on which he now dreams of sitting.
“If the House gave itself a speaker damaged by ethical considerations and with serious credibility problems, this would test the legitimacy of this institution but also its long-term stability,” believes American politics specialist Keith Gåddie, joined this week from Texas Christian University. And the only positive thing at the moment, according to him, “is that the vote he has received to date [pour devenir président de la Chambre] is weaker than that received by Kevin McCarthy last January, at the start of his race. Eight months before his impeachment, it ultimately took 14 rounds of voting for McCarthy to be able to hold the gavel, and this, after having rallied one by one the handful of extremist Republicans refusing to vote for him, and who were finally origin of his fall.
This week, Jim Jordan failed to obtain the 217 votes necessary for his knighthood. However, even if 199 Republicans supported him during the last vote on Wednesday, he faces a hard core of 22 elected officials from his party, more moderate or representatives of districts where they are threatened by Democrats, who refuse to entrust the keys to the Dome of Democracy to this representative of Donald Trump’s radical movement. A resistance supported by the Democrats who see in this candidacy “an obvious and very real danger for our democracy”, said the leader of the Democratic minority, Hakeem Jeffries, on Thursday. He speaks of Jim Jordan as the “headliner of MAGA extremism,” the former president’s Make America Great Again.
Deleterious blockage
The inability of Republican representatives to choose a president is playing out in a tense context and while the White House needs the lower house, where the opposition is in the majority, to resolve a budgetary crisis threatening technical closure of part of the government in a few weeks. American aid to Ukraine, but also to Israel, is also compromised by this blockage of the institution.
“At this critical time nationally and internationally, it is very difficult for the government to operate with this impasse,” says political scientist Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois. And the election of Jim Jordan ultimately won’t change much, since he is unlikely to cooperate with the Biden administration and the Senate [à majorité démocrate]. Ultimately, this will mainly weaken the credibility of the House of Representatives, but it is likely that we will survive it, as we survived four years of presidency under Donald Trump.
The damage has already been done, believes Bilal Dabir Sekou, a keen observer of American politics at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. “Opinion polls confirm that the House receives very little consideration from American voters,” he said. “The Republican base also does not seem interested in compromising with the Democrats on the major issues of the moment. So, if Jim Jordan is elected, this will only fuel the efforts of Republicans within the institution to affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential elections. Nothing else. “. A perspective aimed at promoting what the elected official from Ohio has been seeking since 2020: the return of Donald Trump to the White House, by force, shenanigans or obstruction, failing to have access to it through democracy and the ballot box.