House Republicans Couldn’t Have Picked a Worse Minority Speaker

2 min readPolitico has a very strange story about the battle for Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson already has scratched himself from the race to become the next Minority Leader. And here is Politico's take, which seems very, very odd.One week after suffering devastating midterm losses, Republicans in the House will decide just how thoroughly to clean their own house. While Speaker Mike Johnson is exiting the scene in January, Tuesday’s GOP leadership elections will still pit members of the existing leadership structure against insurgents who are hoping to capitalize on the desire for a clean slate.So far, this is a run-of-the-mill state of the losers post-election story. The losing side, particularly a catastrophically losing side, always spends some time in public introspection. It's almost a kind of penance. But here's where the story spins out.“Somebody’s got to get fired,” said Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), who said he is backing outsiders in the three top races “because we got our butts handed to us.” At the top of that slate is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a 20-year House veteran and a well-known face of the GOP’s hard-right wing who nevertheless has never served in the senior leadership ranks. He is facing off for minority leader against Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the sitting majority leader who has held the party’s No. 2 or No. 3 slot since 2014.Jordan is pledging a fresh look for the House GOP’s top echelon and has swiped at Johnson and Scalise for having too often “operated without a clear plan to survive the hour or the day in front of us.”As I'm sure Stutzman knows, on any issue that both involves the administration and drove voters in the midterm elections, there's not a dime's worth of difference between Scalise and Jordan (R-Van Heusen). They have both been loyal foot soldiers of the MAGA regime. Both of them supported at least one objection to certify the results in 2020. So, on Tuesday, when Jordan thumped Scalise and became the GOP leader, 106-73, it will be interpreted as another defeat for Johnson's old leadership team. But the promotion of Jordan doesn't answer any of the problems that contributed to the loss of Congress by the Republicans. Jordan's knees haven't stopped jerking since 2017. He hunted every snipe at which the administration pointed, even the ones that didn't exist, which was a substantial number of them. He was rude and approximately as committed to bipartisanship as a manhole cover. If the primary issue in the election was corruption, Jordan has made a career out of supplying alibis.I hope Speaker-in-waiting Jeffries realizes all of this. This is the legislative equivalent of Stephen Miller running the White House. I'd say the Republicans could have found someone more dedicated to getting things done, but there isn't anybody like that left.