Even Republicans have described last week’s midterm elections as a “Watergate-level repudiation” and “close to an extinction-level event for the Republican Party.” The absolute clobbering of the GOP, even in red states, was a referendum on President Donald Trump and Republicans’ failure to deliver key policy wins for the American people. Yet rather than a course correction, House Republicans have just elected a new leader who will double down: Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.
Jordan is a MAGA diehard who is more interested in shielding the lame-duck president and heckling his foes than in working with Democrats to lower costs or end the deeply unpopular Iran war. Voters just punished Republicans for producing spectacle instead of results. The House GOP has responded by electing a leader who embodies that approach and — come January — lacks even the gavel he needs to stage a spectacle.
Jordan himself is on record saying “I didn’t come to Congress to make more laws.”
Jordan’s approach to legislating can be summed up with one statistic: In almost 20 years in Congress, a grand total of zero bills Jordan authored have become law. The closest to substance Jordan ever came was spearheading the House side of the 2013 government shutdown in a failed effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act. The House speaker at the time, Republican (and fellow Ohioan) John Boehner, later told Politico, “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate. A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”
“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart, never building anything, never putting anything together,” Boehner told CBS News’ John Dickerson in 2021. The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a project of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia, ranked Jordan the least effective Republican in the 2023-24 Congress, and he has consistently ranked in the bottom five Republicans.
But don’t take my word for it. Jordan himself is on record saying “I didn’t come to Congress to make more laws.” That will come as a disappointment to the 71% of Americans in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll who want Congress to pass legislation ending the Iran war and the 62% who want the legislative body to work on repealing Trump’s tariffs.
No, instead of getting work for the American taxpayer, Jordan has built a career on Fox News hits and circus-style stunts at hearings. He has made at least 716 weekday appearances on Fox News since 2017. As House Judiciary chairman, Jordan also ran the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. In that role, Jordan promised to prove weaponization of government against conservatives, but came up incredibly short. He claimed to have spoken with dozens and dozens of whistleblowers, but produced three, none of whom produced any firsthand knowledge of his allegations.
Despite unmistakable feedback from the voters — desperate for legislators to change their lives for the better — Republicans have doubled down on a man who is all blustering form over substance.
That has been Jordan’s signature act. On the Benghazi select committee, he spent his time shouting at Hillary Clinton over an anti-Muslim video, as part of several redundant investigations that ended with no charges against her. At a 2021 Covid-19 hearing, he demanded Anthony Fauci name the exact case number at which Americans could “get their freedom back,” refused every answer he got and kept going until Fauci told him, “You’re ranting again.” The clips did numbers on social media, but the oversight produced nothing of value.
The great irony in Republicans rallying behind Jordan, a one-trick pony, is that come January, Congressional Republicans will lose their oversight power as the new Democratic majority comes into office. What will be left is the job that, by his own account, Jordan has never been interested in: counting votes, cutting deals and passing laws.
Jordan told us that he didn’t come to Congress to make laws. Despite unmistakable feedback from the voters — desperate for legislators to change their lives for the better — Republicans have doubled down on a man who is all blustering form over substance. And he is about to learn the hard way that a hearing room when you’re in the minority is just a room.
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