They looked over Jim Jordan, and what did they see?

The three attempts by Jim Jordan to become Speaker of the House of Representatives ended in failure. Opposition from Republicans grew each time, from 20 to 22 to 25. In a secret caucus vote at the end of last week, House Republicans voted 112-86 to drop him as their party’s Speaker nominee.

As they looked over Jordan, these Republicans, some of whom had been bullied or threatened with violence if they continued to oppose him, did not see a band of angels comin’ for to carry them home. Or a Speaker capable of or even interested in getting legislation through a divided Congress.

Jordan has served in the House since 2007. A founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, an in-your-face right-wing group of about forty members, he once said, “I didn’t come to Congress to make more laws.” Jordan was an architect of the 2013 government shutdown, undertaken in opposition to the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, he was part of a faction that threatened Speaker John Boehner with a motion to vacate. In 2018, he pushed for another government shutdown, to force Democrats to appropriate money to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart,” said Boehner, who also dubbed Jordan “a legislative terrorist.” In 2023, Jordan voted against the continuing resolution, endorsed by Speaker McCarthy, to avoid a government shutdown.

In his 16 years in Congress, Jordan did not introduce a single bill that passed both houses of Congress. The Center for Effective Lawmaking has ranked him in the bottom five (or worse) among House Republicans in the last four Congresses. (By contrast, Kevin McCarthy sponsored 17 bills that passed the House, eight of which became law, five of them substantive.) A ranking of bipartisanship put Jordan 428th out of 435 House members, with such luminaries as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert below him.

Jordan’s visibility rests largely on his role as a fast-talking and combative — if often irresponsible — member or chair of House investigative committees, and his regular appearances on Fox News. During the Biden impeachment inquiry in September, Jordan described “a tale as old as time. Politician takes action that makes money for his family and then he tries to conceal it.” He alleged that Biden, as vice president, “leveraged our tax money” to fire Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor, in order to stop him from investigating Burisma, the corporation which had paid Biden’s son Hunter a hefty salary. Widely regarded as corrupt, however, Shokin wasn’t investigating Burisma. And Biden was trying to implement an initiative by the U.S. and Western European governments to oust him.

Jordan also claimed that Department of Justice officials improperly blocked investigators from asking about information about Biden in a 2020 search warrant related to Hunter’s overseas business dealings. The instructions, it turned out, were issued because the request was neither appropriate nor within the scope of warrant. Nor did Jordan mention that the incident occurred while Donald Trump was president, and DOJ officials reported to Attorney General Bill Barr.

All the expert witnesses selected by Chairmen Jordan, it’s worth noting, testified at the impeachment hearing that there is as yet no evidence that President Biden committed a crime. “I’m not here today,” said forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky, “to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing.”

A few House Republicans, including some staunch conservatives, also expressed concerns — about having a Speaker who is an election denier, who lobbied Vice President Pence to reject duly certified Electoral College results, who spoke with Trump and Rudy Giuliani several times on January 6, who refused to comply with a House Select Committee subpoena to discuss those conversations and who asked White House staff about pardons for members of Congress.

When GOP Rep. French Hill asked him whether he believed Trump won the 2020 election, Jordan referred only to “all kinds of problems” with the vote. Jordan “is going to have to be strong and say, ‘Donald Trump didn’t win the election,’” said fellow Republican Rep. Ken Buck.

If and when American voters across the political spectrum look over Jordan, what will they see? A poster child, perhaps, of a political party comprised of too many hyperpartisan politicians who disdain government, governing, fidelity to the truth and the foundational principles of our democracy. 

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”