Jim Jordan tries to win over GOP to become next House speaker – live

Social media commentators didn’t have much faith in Steve Scalise’s aspirations to become the next House speaker, including one user who correctly predicted that a head of lettuce would outlast the Majority Leader’s goals.

“My money’s on the lettuce,” MeidasTouch Network posted on X on Thursday, alongside a picture featuring a framed photo of Mr Scalise next to an example of the salad ingredient adorned with googly eyes.

“Winning. Winner. Won,” one user wrote.

“The undefeated Lettuce wins again,” another joked.

The post was an echo of memes by British newspaper the Daily Star that haunted embattled UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose short tenure in the post was compared to the “shelf-life of a lettuce” in The Economist.

Rep Jim Jordan is now faced with the challenge of trying to win over members of the Republican party so that he can secure enough votes to become the next speaker of the House of Representatives.

The Ohio congressman won the GOP nomination on Friday afternoon, beating challenger Rep Austin Scott by 124 votes to 81. Mr Scott is reported to not actually want to be speaker, with observers saying the vote for him indicates the significant part of the party which would be uncomfortable with Mr Jordan as speaker.

Mr Jordan is facing an uphill climb to secure the 217 votes needed by Tuesday when the House is expected to bring a vote to the floor.

He spent the weekend trying to win over support and is said to be confident that he can get to the necessary votes to take the gavel.

But, one House Republican told CBS News on Sunday that 10 to 20 members are still refusing to back him.

Mike Pence said on Friday that it was a “breach of trust” for some Republicans not to back Steve Scalise after he was nominated to be speaker.

“It’s time for them to step up … Get it done this week because the days are only becoming more dangerous and more perilous,” he said.

“The adults in the room on Capitol Hill … ought to sit some people down. Just ask them if they want to be on the team … I give no quarter to those that are sowing chaos in the Congress today,” he added.

Reps Chip Roy and Troy Nehls of Texas both said that the House included aid to Israel in the defence spending bill it passed before the coup against Mr McCarthy and that the Senate should take it up. But that bill was always a non-starter given the conservative riders.

Speaking of which, the House still needs to pass spending bills. Remember, the whole reason the House is in this mess is because a handful of Republicans revolted when Mr McCarthy passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open for 48 days.

Instead of passing bills, the House is fighting about a speaker, and given that Republicans prefer to pass individual spending bills instead of one major omnibus spending bill, that makes appropriations take much longer.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that they would eventually need to negotiate with the Democrat-controlled Senate in conference to create compromise bills, which would inevitably infuriate conservatives and likely lead to another mutiny not unlike what just happened – or the government might just shut down right before the holidays.

If Republicans had a speaker right now, they likely would be attempting to pressure President Joe Biden to give greater support to Israel, despite the fact the president has thrown his support robustly behind the country. Indeed, when your reporter tried asking the former speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday about what message this sends given that the Middle East is on fire, he tried to blame Mr Biden.

“We have continuity of government here, I think it says more that it takes the president too long to come out and talk,” Mr McCarthy said. During his speakership, Mr McCarthy traveled to Israel and invited President Isaac Herzog to give a joint address to Congress. Republicans would ideally like to criticise those Democrats who boycotted the speech earlier this year in protest of Israel’s record on human rights. But the speaker’s crisis makes it hard to do so.

But the holdouts don’t seem that flustered. Rep Andy Ogles (R-TN), who opposed Mr Scalise said Israel could handle its own issues.

“Israel does not need our resources,” he told The Independent on Thursday. “They’re well equipped to take care of their own business. I think what quite frankly, we need to stop meddling in their foreign policy and let them do what they have to do which is wipe out Hamas.”

While the temptation for schadenfreude may be strong, the GOP’s inability to find a speaker has real-life consequences. It comes as Congress is unable to address multiple crises on the domestic and international front and seriously risks jeopardizing the United States’ standing.

Perhaps the biggest challenge the United States faces is how to respond to the recent attack by Hamas in Israel, both in how to support Israel after the attacks that led to the deaths of hundreds, the taking of hostages and the killing of children, as well as how to ensure that Israel follows international law.

Many Republicans seem to know that the speaker’s crisis makes it hard to support Israel, which is a core tenet of conservative ideology given how many conservative Christians support Israel as part of end-times theology and their general belief in a hawkish foreign policy.

“The world is looking at us right now in this basement room of how we’re going to move forward,” Rep Mark Alford of Missouri said.

When Mr Ryan left the speakership in 2019, Mr Jordan became a trusted ally of then-minority leader Kevin McCarthy. He also became a welcome fixture at the White House and led efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. On 5 November 2020, he participated in a rally to “Stop the Steal” at Pennsylvania’s state capitol in Harrisburg.

The House select committee that investigated the January 6 riot found that on 21 December 2020, Mr Jordan and a handful of House Republicans met with Mr Trump to discuss efforts to object to the election results and Mr Trump held the event to “disseminate his false claims and to encourage members of the public to fight the outcome on January 6”. He also admitted that he spoke with Mr Trump on the day of the January 6 riot.

In 2021, when the House organised the select committee to investigate January 6, Mr McCarthy selected Mr Jordan and Rep Jim Banks (R-IN), two allies of Mr Trump, as two of his five selections for the committee. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected Mr Banks and Mr Jordan, which led to Mr McCarthy pulling the rest of his members.

Over time, Mr McCarthy continued to elevate him, having him lead a subcommittee on the “weaponisation” of the federal government. Earlier this year, when many critics of Mr McCarthy opted to support him, he encouraged them to support Mr McCarthy, saying “I think Kevin McCarthy’s the right guy to lead us. I really do, or I wouldn’t be standing up here giving up this speech”.

In turn, Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who nominated Mr Jordan, said the speech made him just the right candidate to lead the House, adding, “Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn’t someone who wants it so bad”.

When Mr Gaetz filed a motion to vacate this week, Mr Jordan voted against it.

Mr Boehner’s ouster gave Mr Jordan increased political clout. During Paul Ryan’s speakership, Mr Jordan continued to criticise the House GOP leadership. When Donald Trump became president, Mr Jordan quickly became a fixture in conservative media criticising attempts of the “deep state” to undermine Mr Trump.

On the House Judiciary Committee, Mr Jordan served as one of the chief apologists during Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial, aggressively questioning witnesses who alleged that Mr Trump sought to have Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for aid to Ukraine as a means to help him win re-election.

When Mr Meadows left the House to become White House chief of staff, Mr Jordan became chairman of the Oversight Committee before resigning that post to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr Jordan holds few legislative accomplishments and he criticised leaders in his own party as often as he criticised the Obama administration and Democrats. Rather than focusing on the work of governing, he focused more on raising his objections in the media.

After Republicans won the majority in the House of Representatives, he turned down a position on the House Appropriations Committee, which allocates money to various programmes and has long been considered the most prestigious committee in the House. Rather, he chose to lead the Republican Study Committee, an ideologically conservative focused on advancing conservative policies.

In 2013, he and a handful of Tea Party conservatives teamed up with Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) in an effort to shut down the government if Congress did not defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The effort would never be successful since Democrats controlled the Senate at the time and Mr Obama still occupied the White House. But it burnished Mr Jordan’s credentials as a conservative warrior.

In 2015, he became the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, serving as its inaugural chairman. Ultimately, his colleague Mark Meadows, a congressman from North Carolina who would go on to serve as White House chief of staff, filed a motion to vacate the chair during John Boehner’s tenure as speaker. The vote never came but it was enough to end Mr Boehner’s time as speaker. Later, Mr Boehner would criticise his tactics. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” before dubbing him “a legislative terrorist”.

Prior to serving in Congress, Mr Jordan attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became a champion wrestler in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletics Association. Shortly thereafter, he received a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a law degree from Capital University Law School, though he never took the bar exam and never practised law, telling NPR in 2018, “I’m just a wannabe”.

He later served in both chambers of Ohio’s General Assembly before he won a seat in the US Congress in 2006. In the following years, he became one of the loudest voices in the Tea Party movement that served as a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency.