Here's Why Jim Jordan Thought He Could Be Speaker
But even the most skilled members can't control the runaway clown car that the GOP has become--and as it turns out, Jordan isn't one of them
This week’s Speaker of the House, in case you lost track, is Christian Nationalist Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District. But that won’t be interesting unless he lasts longer than the lettuce. Nor is the story of Republican disarray interesting. But what is interesting is that the battle for the gavel has revealed that, in making anti-elitism the central ethic of the party, the GOP House Caucus may be disassembling, not just its leadership apparatus, but its fundraising capacity too.
But first, let’s recap some of the most hair-raising action on the House Floor since the 19th century. Jordan, you may recall, was Bachelor #2 in the ongoing reality show of that the Republican House Caucus puts on instead of governing. After having rejected Bachelor #1 Steve Scalise (LA-01), the House Whip and the person who would normally be in a position to move up when the Leader’s position becomes vacant, Jordan’s allies then secured a majority in closed-door balloting and brought his nomination to the floor.
This basically scared the bejeezus out of everyone including, as it turns out, two dozen of Jordan’s colleagues. Donald Trump endorsed Jordan, but after failing to garner enough votes over the course of three ballots, the Republican conference dumped him too. Once again, we see the limits of Trump’s influence in a party that is still prepared to nominate him. In addition, rumors that Jordan’s allies tried to threaten and bully his opponents into voting for him may point to why, with every vote taken on the floor, Jordan became progressively less popular among his own people.
But let’s look at some other factors here, since even the specter of Jordan’s speakership caused him to receive a lot of unwanted attention. And that attention revealed several things, other than the endemic sexual harassment in the Ohio State athletic department when he was an assistant wrestling coach there. Stunningly, over the course of 18 years in Congress, Jordan has never passed a piece of legislation. “Congress these days passes few bills, and many members never get one they wrote signed into law,” writes Aaron Blake of the Washington Post. And many bills that are passed are not “substantive bills,” in other words, bills that have a material impact, as opposed to bills that rename a post office or symbolically honor a constituent.
But it’s particularly alarming that someone who ran for Speaker apparently has no interest in writing, passing, or negotiating the bills he would be charged with bringing to the floor. Because of this dismal record, Jordan ranked fourth from the bottom in the 117th Congress on an “effectiveness scale” established by the Vanderbilt-University of Virginia’s Center for Effective Lawmaking, a position he has grimly held for the last four Congresses. Although he has co-sponsored 64 bills, nearly all have been too partisan to have a chance of passing the House, much less the Senate. Only Robert Aderholt (R-AL, 4), Brad Finstd (R, MN-1), and Kay Granger (R, TX-12) have lower scores than Jordan. Their scores are zero: only one Democrat, Marcia Fudge (OH-11) has a score of zero. Jordan’s score is .009: contrast that with fellow Republican fire-breathers Matt Gaetz (FL-1, .096), Marjorie Taylor Greene (.GA-14, 117), Ronny Jackson (TX-13, .239), and Lauren Boebert (CO-3, .292).
Now, none of these guys are legislative monsters: the top Republican score is Don Bacon (NE-2, 6.137) and the top Democratic score is Gerald Connelly (VA-11, 7.142). But Jordan’s extreme ineffectiveness in Congress prompts the question: if you are less effective than Boebert, Gaetz, and Greene, what the ever-living fuck does Jordan actually do?
And the answer is that Jordan raises money. Lots of it. In the 2022 cycle, although he was exceeded by Kevin McCarthy (CA-20, $27,362,324), Scalise ($18,397,997), and Dan Crenshaw (TX-02, $15,380,087), Jordan came in at #4 with $13,975,653. In 2020, the year he broke the top ten, Jordan came in at #8, this time with $18,313,823.
What is intriguing is that between 2006, when he was first elected, and 2018, Jordan had never raised more than $1.4 million per cycle, usually less. And Jordan has always been a decent fund raiser. He has out-raised and out-spent his opponents (by an average of 10-1, sometimes more and sometimes less) since 2006, when he was first elected to Congress. This reflects what a red district OH-4 is and how little money Democrats were willing to put into opposing him.
But having raised $1,239,307 in 2016, the year Trump was elected, Jordan’s take suddenly shot up to that whopping $18,011,762 number. And he certainly didn’t spend that money on himself, because his challenger, Democrat Shannon Freshour raised….nothing. Literally $0. Yet, Jordan spent $13,671,320 in that cycle, probably in a range of other districts where candidates needed extra funding to compete.
Similarly, in 2022, Jordan raised $13,975,653 against Democrat Tamie Wilson who raised $168,937. Wilson spent it all; Jordan spent $12 million, and it wasn’t because he was in a close race. In addition, Jordan’s Buckeye Leadership PAC, a type of campaign fund that does not need to disclose details about its donors or expenditures, and which exists for Jordan to fund his allies, raised, and spent, $3.2 million.
In other words, Jordan is a little ATM for the Republican Party; his other main job is to stoke conspiracy theories about Democrats that help him and other extremists raise money. More modestly, other highly visible, underachieving GOP nutjobs also saw big jumps in their Leadership PAC fundraising between 2020 and 2022. Marjorie Taylor Greene went from $2.37 million in 2020 to $12.5 million, and Lauren Boebert made a less impressive, but still substantive, jump from $2.99 to $7.74 million.
Interestingly, the one Weird Sister who has not capitalized on this phenomenon is Matt Gaetz, whose Leadership PAC raised an anemic$5,000 in 2022 and spent over $9,000. Although he raised $6.38 million in 2022 (and overspent that too—by a million dollars!), we are halfway through the 2024 cycle, and he has raised less than a third of that. In fact, as far as I can tell, Gaetz has not yet paid the bills for 2022—unless Jim Jordan or some other Sugar Daddy pitched in.
The GOP has been trending in this direction for awhile. Kevin McCarthy wasn’t a political genius (obviously!): he rode his fundraising prowess to the Speakership. So, we can easily imagine Jim Jordan looking in the mirror while pasting down his comb over and whispering to himself, “Why not me?”
Perhaps he even fooled himself into thinking he had ever passed legislation, or that the unpleasant business about the team doctor groping his athletes had finally gone away. And maybe he thought that all that money he had spread around in the last three years would even lure members of the caucus who clearly hated his guts and have contempt for his inability to do actual work.
He was wrong, and here’s the humiliating part. Mike Johnson, the new Speaker, is neither an effective lawmaker (a less than mediocre 1.1 score from the Center for Effective Lawmaking—although he is more effective than any other lawmaker from Louisiana, which ain’t saying much) and he also raises almost no money ($1.2 million in 2020, and $1.3 million in 2022. McCarthy, by contrast, raised $27.5 million for his Leadership PAC alone in 2022, and $62.5 million for his caucus over all.
Now that is money and knocking that kind of fund raising prowess out of the leadership leaves a lot of open questions for how the next 12 months will go for a Republican majority that can’t afford to lose even half a dozen seats—to be precise, four: whether George Santos (R, NY-03) is expelled or not, he won’t be back in January 2025. Because although Jordan clearly has more fundraising talent than the average bear, it isn’t at all clear that he or anyone else can repair Republican Congressional fundraising in time for the 2024 election.
Let’s hope not, at any rate.
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Short takes:
Mississippi—Goddamn! This morning, Mississippi Today journalists Julia James, Geoff Pender, Bobby Harrison, Taylor Vance and Adam Ganucheau report that Governor Tate Reeves, already enmeshed in a welfare fraud scandal, has awarded $1.4 billion in state contracts to campaign donors. “The $1.4 billion total in state contracts identified by Mississippi Today does not include dozens of additional contracts the Reeves donors have received from state agencies not led by the governor. For example, the Mississippi Department of Transportation awarded the governor’s top donors at least $552 million since 2020,” the investigative team reports. “The total also doesn’t include millions in incentives and tax breaks many of his top donors have received, and it doesn’t include any state contracts that Reeves donors who have given less than $50,000 may have received.” And the best part? There is no law rewarding campaign donors in Mississippi. (October 31, 2023)
Watch this space. The next move against Donald J. Trump is in Colorado: a group of Republican and unaffiliated voters have filed a lawsuit arguing that, as an insurrectionist, the Former Guy cannot be President. “They argue that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Tori Otten reports at The New Republic. “That section of the Constitution states that anyone who has taken an oath of office to the United States and then `engages in insurrection or rebellion’ against the country is banned from holding public office again.” Opening statements in the suit were yesterday. (October 30, 2023)
Is there Kenough corruption for Texans to care yet? You may recall that Texas attorney general Ken Paxton was recently impeached; he then won his trial and was put back in office. But there is another trial, one where he can’t count on the political network that came through for him the first time, because it will be in an actual court room. It’s a securities fraud case, first filed in 2015, and the trial will begin April 15, 2024. “Paxton is accused of encouraging investors— including friends and a Texas lawmaker—in 2011 to invest in a technology startup without disclosing that he was being paid by the firm for those referrals. He also is accused of soliciting clients for a friend’s investment company without registering as an adviser with the state,” Houston Chronicle reporter Taylor Goldenstein writes. “The charges carry a potential sentence of 99 years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in fines, and, if convicted, he would be disqualified from holding state office. Paxton has pleaded not guilty.” (October 30, 2023)
And Johnson is not just your run-of-the-mill Christian Nationalist, he is a theonomist, Christian reconstructionist. You know, the Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council, type of Christian Nationalist. Escapee evangelical Frank Schaeffer has been sounding the alarm as someone who once knew the insanity from the inside.
Johnson gives me the chills. There's something "off" about that dude. Regarding the odious Jim Jordan and to misquote Yogi Berra: ""Politics is 90 percent mental. The other half is money."