Jim Jordan’s no outlier: He fits right into the GOP’s post-Gingrich history of ruthless trolling

Another day, another clusterf***k in the U.S. House of Representatives. After days of behind-the-scenes haggling (and reports of strong-arming) Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said he was ready to call a vote that would make him the new speaker of the House. Word on Tuesday morning was that his team believed they had commitments for the necessary votes and the worst-case scenario would be GOP defections in the single digits, which were rationalized as protest votes that would fall away on a second ballot. As it turned out, Jordan lost 20 votes among his fellow Republicans. After originally calling for another vote on Tuesday evening, he scuppered the whole thing until Wednesday morning.

By the time you read this, that vote could have taken place already — or perhaps Jordan has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out. Reports suggest there are now serious discussions of electing Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who is virtually powerless, as a real-but-temporary speaker with full powers to get the House through the appropriations process. Nobody seems to know exactly how that would work, since the House has to have a speaker before it can vote on anything else (such as changing the rules about the speakership). Some congressmen are now calling for defrocked former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to be reinstated, which would mike the perfect coda to this absurd brouhaha.

One of the main objections to Jim Jordan is that he’s too ideologically extreme and will hurt the Republicans’ chances of maintaining the majority in 2024. There are 18 House members who were elected in congressional districts won by Joe Biden in 2020, and it’s assumed they will be in danger if a full-blown MAGA wingnut becomes speaker of the House. Some of those members voted for Jordan on Tuesday so they may not be convinced, but Democrats are making it clear that they see this as an opportunity. Jordan’s record is as far right as you can get, and he’s joined at the hip with Donald Trump, who is likely still toxic in those districts.

But the idea that Jordan would be a departure from all the alleged statesmen who previously served as Republican House speakers, and that the maelstrom that’s engulfed this Congress since the GOP took over in January is completely unprecedented simply isn’t true. In fact, Jordan and the rest of the House rebels are part of a long Republican tradition.

Back in the 1980s, the “Reagan Revolution” brought into Congress a group of backbench bomb-throwers led by an obscure Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich. He was highly adept at getting attention from the nascent right-wing media, which in those early days mostly meant talk radio. He first came to national notice in 1988, when he maneuvered to oust Democratic Speaker Jim Wright over an ethics complaint. He said at the time, “I’ll just keep pounding and pounding on his ethics. There comes a point where it comes together and the media takes off on it, or it dies. What I really want is to get some people with subpoenas poking around.” (Gingrich himself had a similar ethics problem, which made this a “chef’s kiss” of a political gambit, and secured his place in GOP as a bold risk-taker.) Wright was hastily replaced by another Democratic speaker, Tom Foley, but that was the play that started the process that led to where we are today.

Gingrich started his climb into the leadership right away and by 1994 he was not only the undisputed leader of the House Republicans but effectively the leader of the entire Republican Party. When he led the GOP to their massive win in that year’s midterm elections, there was talk in the political media that Gingrich would become “co-president” with Bill Clinton, and might have to run against him in 1996 for the good of the country.

He and his accomplices reveled in persecuting Bill and Hillary Clinton, feeding on the tales of small-state corruption and lurid sexual misdeeds of Arkansas’ gothic political culture. That launched the practice of nonstop tabloid-style congressional investigations that continues to this day. Their smash-mouth rhetoric and crude character assassination was not entirely without precedent in American politics — but it was the modern conservative movement, under Gingrich, that took it mainstream.

But the old “live by the sword, die by the sword” trope came back to bite Newt in 1997 when an insurgent group of 20 or so members from the class of ’94 concluded that Gingrich had betrayed their principles and recruited his top lieutenants to bring him an ultimatum: Resign, or they would remove him by parliamentary maneuver. Unfortunately for them, the top lieutenants began bickering among themselves like Keystone Kops; the plot leaked to the press and Gingrich survived, although from that moment onward he was hanging by a thread.

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When his predictions of massive gains in the 1998 midterms turned to dust, Gingrich knew he no longer had the support of the GOP caucus and resigned. At that time it seemed like half the men in Washington were being exposed as philanderers and Gingrich was among them, as was the man who maneuvered behind the scenes to become his apparent successor, Bob Livingston of Louisiana. After Livingston’s candidacy flamed out, Republicans settled on a little-known member of the leadership, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who became who became the longest-serving GOP speaker. It was only years later that it became clear Hastert had been paying off a former student to stay quiet about his sexual abuse of underage boys as a high school teacher and wrestling coach, which landed him in federal prison. 

The next Republican speaker, after the GOP won back the House in the “Tea Party wave” of 2010, was John Boehner of Ohio, one of the original Gingrich coup plotters. As many readers will remember, he was eventually forced out by Tea Party backbenchers, one of whom was Jim Jordan among them. Boehner’s eventual successor, Paul Ryan, found himself jeered at town halls and rallies and quit Congress after Democrats won back the majority in 2016. That brings us all the way to Kevin McCarthy who was ousted after less than nine months as speaker, in a parliamentary maneuver much like the one the Keystone Kop coup plotters of ’97 used to threaten Gingrich.

So Jim Jordan is certainly an extremist whose legislative record is nonexistent and whose entire career in Congress has been devoted to culture-war issues, Fox News hits, insurrection and character assassination. But he’s hardly unique. (Hey, he’s even got a wrestling-related abuse scandal on his résumé.) If anything, he’s the natural heir to the Gingrich revolution. And there are plenty more lined up right behind him.