There are reportedly nine candidates now that madman Jim Jordan has been defeated for the third time. Whatever their actual or presumed credentials are for the job, the single telling distinction between them is absolutely clear:
Only two putative GOP Speakers voted to certify the election of Joe Biden
They are:
Tom Emmer (Minn.)
Austin Scott (Ga.)
The other seven – well, they are pretty much Trumpers.
Interestingly though, all nine voted for Jim Jordan on all three of his failed attempts to get the Speaker spot. https://tinyurl.com/yf255a4n And,
Emmer … offered his support for a lawsuit that would have even more broadly upended the election results. Scott was included on The Washington Post’s list of election deniers running in 2022.
Finally, not to belabor this, do not forget that the Speaker of the House is much more than the default manager of the House-in-Session. The Speaker is next in line to occupy the office of the President following the Vice President.
Thus, if the Republican clowns in the House had elected Jim Jordan as Speaker, he could have succeeded to the presidency if both the then president and vice president died or were incapacitated. Jordan, who has been elected in Ohio’s 4th Congressional District nine times, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jordan, brought to Congress credentials as a wrestling coach. As reported in Wikipedia,
Jordan is a close ally of former president Donald Trump. During Trump’s presidency, Jordan sought to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and staged a sit-in to prevent a Trump impeachment inquiry hearing over the Trump–Zelenskyy telephone controversy. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Trump tried to overturn the election, Jordan supported lawsuits to challenge the election results and voted not to certify the Electoral College results. He refused to cooperate with the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, which subpoenaed him on May 12, 2022….
Jordan earned a master’s degree in education from Ohio State University and received a Juris Doctor degree from the Capital University Law School in 2001. In a 2018 interview, Jordan said he never took the bar examination.
Note 1: Jordan’s law school entering class in 2022 had a median LSAT score of 151. The range of LSAT scores is 120 to 180. Jordan’s LSAT score has apparently not been reported.
Note 2: Researchers at the Center for Effective Lawmaking – a joint project between academics at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University – rated Jordan as the 202nd most effective Republican in the House of Representatives out of 205 it examined. https://tinyurl.com/3vuf4e26
No wrestlers have accused Jordan himself of sexual misconduct, but four former wrestlers named him as a defendant in a lawsuit against the university. Jordan has denied any wrongdoing, has refused to cooperate with investigations into Strauss and has described his accusers as “pawns in a political plot.”
As of 2023, Jordan, who has served in the House of Representatives for over 16 years, has never sponsored a bill that later became law.
Jordan is now, apparently, out of the Speaker picture. I laid out some salient facts about him to add gravitas to the situation facing the country as the GOP continues its long journey to find a replacement for the disgraced Kevin McCarthy.
There appears to be a better than 50-50 chance that the Republicans will elect a Speaker who supports the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that Donald Trump is innocent of the astonishing list of felonious crimes with which he has been charged in four jurisdictions and for which the known evidence of guilt is overwhelming. That person then stands just below the Vice President as a successor to the vast powers of the presidency of the United States.
That is where we are because that is where the Republican Party has brought us.
SHINING SEA 