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jim jordan
Big Tech’s Most Effective Lobbyist, Jim Jordan, Is Temporarily Constrained
The House Judiciary Committee under Jordan has not merely diverged from bipartisan concerns over corporate power, it has helped neutralize any meaningful legislative solutions by redefining the very nature of the threat.
Oct 12, 2025
A silver lining of the current government shutdown is that Rep. Jim Jordan can no longer use his position as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to waste taxpayer dollars lobbying for the most powerful technology corporations.
The most recent example of this waste was a nearly five-hour hearing in which Rep. Jordan (R-Ohio) gave the United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage a platform on Capitol Hill to attack Britain’s efforts to protect children online and the European Union's efforts to address the dominance of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft in European digital markets. Also discussed were European efforts to set ground rules for digital information ecosystems. The hearing produced fireworks and sound bites about “authoritarian” speech policing. It was a performative act dressed up as oversight.
Are these laws perfect? No. Do they apply in the United States? No. Should we be spending taxpayer dollars to lobby for trillion-dollar companies abroad? No. Yet, Jim Jordan has been traveling the world on our dime to lobby for Big Tech in the name of protecting “free speech.”
This shift from antitrust to anti-woke is a gift to Big Tech.
House Republicans keep promising a crusade against Big Tech’s power. If they were serious, they would likely find support from their Democratic colleagues.
The industry's greatest vulnerability lies in the economic arguments against the harms of market concentration—arguments supported by a growing body of evidence and bipartisan concern. The industry’s greatest strength, however, lies in its ability to reframe any regulatory effort as a politically charged battle over the First Amendment.
The House Judiciary Committee under Jim Jordan has not merely diverged from bipartisan concerns over corporate power and its harms to children. It has become the perfect rhetorical counteroffensive by helping neutralize any meaningful legislative solutions by redefining the very nature of the threat. Where most see a market failure requiring economic intervention, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan alleges political persecution requiring investigations into government "weaponization." This redefinition is the single most valuable outcome a regulated industry could hope for from its oversight body, transforming a legislative threat into a political shield.
Where is the House Judiciary Committee that conducted a landmark 16-month investigation into the market power of Apple, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), and Google?
That bipartisan investigation—spanning seven hearings and nearly a million documents—produced broad consensus on the problems affecting these markets, and the need for more resources for antitrust enforcement.
That is the hard work of governing. What Jim Jordan has delivered instead is theater.
The result is that the real work of promoting open markets where everyone has a fair shot remains unfinished. Congress could pass legislation to address the monopoly power that allows Apple and Google to control our smartphones, Amazon to exploit small businesses and consumers, and Meta to operate with little regard for the welfare of our children.
None of this requires viral hearings. House Republicans keep promising a crusade against Big Tech’s power. If they were serious, they would likely find support from their Democratic colleagues. Few issues have managed to forge the kind of bipartisan consensus seen in the effort to rein in the monopolistic power of the largest corporations.
Unfortunately, that seems unlikely under the leadership of Jim Jordan.
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After Reporting and Backlash, Republicans Drop Sneaky Effort to Gut FTC—For Now
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said one antitrust advocate.
May 01, 2025
House Republicans on Wednesday dropped an effort to hamstring the Federal Trade Commission's ability to fight corporate consolidation after antitrust advocates, Democratic lawmakers, and news outlets—including Common Dreams—highlighted and sounded the alarm over the proposal.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed during a markup hearing Wednesday to remove the proposal from the panel's section of the GOP's sprawling reconciliation package—though he indicated he would try to revive the proposal as a standalone bill at a later date.
The reversal came after Democrats on the panel, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Becca Balint (D-Vt.), ripped the proposal as a disaster for small businesses and consumers.
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape?" Balint asked in fiery remarks at Wednesday's hearing. "You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't pass the straight-face test."
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape? You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense." pic.twitter.com/8EF8AOmW8m
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) April 30, 2025
Jordan ultimately relented and the House Judiciary Committee voted to remove the section in question, which would have transferred the FTC's antitrust staff and funding to the Justice Department—which doesn't have the same statutory authority to protect the American public from "unfair methods of competition."
Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement that Jordan and other Republicans on the judiciary panel "did the right thing scrapping a proposal that would have kneecapped antitrust enforcement against our economy’s most harmful monopolies."
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said Harper.
But Jordan made clear following Wednesday's hearing that he did not agree to remove the FTC proposal from the reconciliation package out of genuine concern about its implications for the future of antitrust enforcement.
Rather, he accepted Republican senators' warnings that the proposal wouldn't comply with the rules of the budget reconciliation process.
"We'll just do it in a standalone bill," Jordan told Punchbowl.
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'This Will Gut the FTC': Republicans Push Musk-Backed Plan to Kill Key Antitrust Law
"Jim Jordan and House Judiciary Republicans are directly undermining both current and future litigation against the monopolies that gouge and censor Americans."
Apr 29, 2025
House Republicans are set to consider legislation on Wednesday that experts say would effectively eliminate a law that gives the Federal Trade Commission sole authority to protect the American public from corporations engaging in "unfair methods of competition."
The GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), released the bill Monday as part of a sweeping, filibuster-proof reconciliation package that Republicans are looking to pass as soon as next month.
The new bill states that "all FTC antitrust actions, all FTC antitrust employees, all FTC antitrust assets, and all FTC antitrust funding" must be "transferred to the attorney general." The proposal is virtually identical to Republican legislation that Elon Musk, a lieutenant of President Donald Trump and the richest person in the world, endorsed earlier this year.
Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, observed Monday that the House Judiciary Committee measure is "not just a bill to change the office locations and reporting structures." Specifically, Stoller noted that the bill doesn't explicitly transfer to the Justice Department the FTC's authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to combat "unfair methods of competition."
"That authority," Stoller wrote, "remains with an agency that has no staff and no capacity to litigate, which means it could die."
Alvaro Bedoya, who is currently engaged in a legal fight to get his job back at the FTC after Trump fired him and another Democratic commissioner last month, echoed Stoller's concerns, writing on social media that the Republican bill "doesn't transfer the laws that FTC enforces, or authority to enforce those laws."
"This will gut the FTC," Bedoya wrote, noting that the agency's legal action against pharmacy benefit managers—pharmaceutical industry middlemen—would likely be among the casualties of the Republican bill, given that "the sole law that the FTC alleges was broken in all three counts was that core prohibition against 'unfair methods of competition.'"
Stoller pointed out in his blog post that Section 5 is also used "in the antitrust case against Amazon" and "another case against Corteva/Syngenta over exclusive dealing in seeds and chemicals." It was also "the authority used to ban noncompete agreements," he wrote.
"These cases, as well as every consent decree ever reached under Section 5, are now at risk," Stoller added.
The House Judiciary Committee is slated to mark up the legislation on Wednesday afternoon, starting at 2:00 pm ET.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Monday that the measure as a whole is "laden with language attempting to protect corporate wrongdoers."
"One provision appears to effectively eliminate the FTC pro-competition division," said Gilbert. "Another set of provisions makes significant changes to the already overreaching Congressional Review Act. One measure says that major rules that raise revenue go into effect only if Congress proactively approves them. Another section says for the next four years Congress has to affirmatively approve rules for them not to expire."
"If made law," she warned, "this would sign a death warrant for a slew of important consumer, worker, and environmental protections."
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Students Demanding Protection for Pro-Palestinian Activism Arrested at House Hearing on Campus Speech
"Palestinian students deserve to speak on the genocide of their families," said one protester as they were led out of the room by police.
Nov 08, 2023
The limits of the Republican-led U.S. House Judiciary Committee's views on freedom of speech were on full display Wednesday shortly after a hearing on "Free Speech on College Campuses" began, when several pro-Palestinian rights demonstrators were removed from the hearing room and arrested for speaking out.
The committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), invited representatives of conservative and pro-Zionist groups including Young Americans for Freedom and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to speak about what Jordan called "hostility towards certain points of view, in particular conservative points of view" amid growing outrage over Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and the West Bank.
"With 'safe spaces' and 'free speech zones' aiming to protect students from violence," Jordan said in his opening remarks, "one would think Jewish students would have somewhere to turn as violent, pro-Hamas students take to their demonstrations and have harmed students on college campuses. That's not the case, as we will see in today's hearing."
But as the hearing got underway, protesters who were among the majority of Americans who support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war currently raging in Gaza were promptly kicked out of the room for demanding that lawmakers consider how their speech has been suppressed since the war began.
One student demanded to know when speaking out against genocide "became antisemitism" as she reminded the committee that more than 4,200 children in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces so far as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government continues to insist it is targeting Hamas in retaliation for the group's October 7 attack on southern Israel.
"What is your right to speech if all of us are not free?" asked the protester as she was pulled out of the room by Capitol Police.
The Hill reported that 10 demonstrators were arrested after interrupting the hearing to say "Free Palestine," "Free Gaza," and "End the siege and the occupation now."
Journalist Dima Amro reported that police confiscated the protesters' keffiyehs and took them to the Capitol Police headquarters.
Jordan cited a "nearly 400% increase in antisemitic incidents, including harassment, vandalism, and assault" in the two weeks after the Hamas attack, but did not mention that the nation's largest Muslim civil rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reported that anti-Muslim violence and harassment reports tripled in October.
Despite their focus on free speech on college campuses, Republicans on the committee also did not appear disturbed by a call by the ADL and Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law—both of which were represented at the hearing—for universities to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
The groups accused SJP of "celebrating terrorism" and said it should be investigated for potentially "providing material support to Hamas."
Last week, the ACLU expressed its strong opposition to "any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses, and urged universities to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights."
"We recognize that colleges and universities are managing heightened threats and anguished tensions on their campuses while trying to keep students safe—and we take those concerns seriously," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "The devastating conflict in Israel and Palestine has embroiled campuses here at home, sometimes resulting in speech that includes terms we vehemently disagree with or even find offensive and repugnant. Yet it's precisely in times of crisis and fear that university leaders must remain firm in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus."
"A blanket call to investigate every chapter of a pro-Palestinian student group for 'material support to terrorists'— without even an attempt to cite evidence—is unwarranted, wrong, and dangerous," Romero added. "It echoes America's mistakes during the McCarthy era and is counterproductive. We urge college and university leaders to hold fast to our nation's best traditions and reject proposals to restrict constitutionally protected speech."
At the hearing Wednesday, one demonstrator told the committee that "Palestinian students deserve to speak on the genocide of their families" and called for lawmakers and universities to "stop silencing Palestinian students."
Jordan's hearing also follows the spreading of misinformation about pro-Palestinian rights demonstration at the University of California, Los Angeles and other schools where students chanted, "Israel, Israel, you can't hide: We charge you with genocide!" Social media users claimed the protesters were calling for a "Jewish genocide."
On Tuesday, Jordan and nearly all other House Republicans were joined by 22 Democrats in voting to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian-American member of the House, for her defense of the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which is commonly used at Palestinian rights protests.
"You are not offering a plurality of opinion," one protester told Jordan, "you are offering partisanship, and you are offering murder to more Gazans."
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Trump’s GOP Wants to Burn the Country Down and Rule the Ashes
They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV, and keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.
Oct 25, 2023
Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum.
Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.
Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.
Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function.
You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his—and it is increasingly his alone—GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.
You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system. Perhaps it’s partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu, Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.
Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker. Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden administration of planning to replace white voters with immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Fearsome Power
Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money. My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape. These days, Miller is himself a president of something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”
Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons. “The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal, so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions.”
Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025. These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of personnel John McEntee. As The New York Times reported in July,
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists, and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle—the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president. In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—provide checks and balances on each other. Under the unitary executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump will agree and act accordingly.
By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two 17th- and 18th-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive, would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a nation’s laws and—just as the name suggests—the executive exists to “execute” them.
Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two. If that were the case, wouldn’t the executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact, Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as Locke argued) the legislative.
Heritage, however, points to Article II, which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on January 6, 2021.
While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power was met with widespread derision.
However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so. As the Times reported in July, their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly that direction.
A (Schedule) F in Government
Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government. Patronage jobs—positions granted, often to the friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors—were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified candidates for specific positions replaced the old system.
Today, the Office of Personnel Management oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.
The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives. It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on various branches of government through such appointments.
It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.
Those 4,000 positions exempted from competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules” (lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5—I told you we were going to get into the weeds!—lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from civil service exams.
Or at least those were all the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued an executive order creating Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”
Such a broad, ill-defined category could, in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.
On taking office, however, President Joe Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least, Schedule F no longer exists.
In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected. That’s where the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).
Jokers to the Right of Me…
The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers. They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence. They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to replace it.
Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were. Did they want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social service programs? Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop funding Ukraine’s war effort?
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:
My goal is to get the most conservative Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and total control—this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our fellow Americans first.
All Together Now
Much of this would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told The Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal
an end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.
I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.
I can’t say it any better than she has. They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes. That would put us on a true Schedule F—for Failed State—a condition this country now seems hellbent on achieving.
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Tom Emmer, Third GOP Speaker Nominee, Drops Out After a Few Hours
As former President Donald Trump attacked him, some progressives argued that "Democrats should only support a speaker that would disempower the Freedom Caucus through a power-sharing agreement."
Oct 24, 2023
Just hours after Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives selected Majority Whip Tom Emmer as their third speaker nominee in as many weeks, the Minnesota congressman dropped out of the race Tuesday afternoon.
Congressman Lance Gooden (R-Texas) told CNN that Emmer "wanted to do what's best for the conference and he didn't have the votes so he pulled his name down and got a standing ovation, and so now we're moving onto the next phase," which is a Tuesday night candidate forum.
Emmer's short-lived campaign followed failed bids by Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in the weeks since a few far-right Republicans joined with Democrats to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), whose January election required 15 rounds of voting.
Over two dozen House Republicans opposed Emmer's bid, leaving him short of the 217 votes necessary for election to the leadership role, and former President Donald Trump—the GOP's 2024 presidential front-runner, despite his legal trouble—spoke out against him on Tuesday.
Trump said on social media that Emmer "never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA," his campaign slogan Make American Great Again, and "voting for a Globalist RINO," or Republican in name only, like him "would be a tragic mistake!"
While some GOP opponents of Emmer tried to paint him as too "moderate," progressives on Tuesday stressed that the Minnesota Republican is anything but, given his record on the 2020 election, reproductive healthcare, the climate emergency, and more.
"So Republicans have picked Tom Emmer as their next speaker nominee. I hear some people alleging he's 'not as bad' as some options," DemCast's Nick Knudsen said on social media Tuesday before the congressman withdrew.
Emmer voted against "the Violence Against Women Act, ensuring our right to contraception, improved red flag laws and banning of high capacity magazines, establishment of a January 6th commission, capping insulin costs at $35, bipartisan infrastructure, and the banning of wage discrimination based on gender (to name a few)," he highlighted. "Sounds pretty bad to me."
Indivisible on Tuesday reiterated a message the progressive group sent last week to every single House Democrat, which says in part that "while House Republicans remain in disarray and are unable to elect a speaker, Democrats have been united around their shared values—prioritizing people over politics and governing effectively."
The message notably went out before Republicans made clear that they won't support temporarily empowering Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) to pass spending bills before a potential government shutdown in mid-November.
"Indivisible encourages all House Democrats to stay united and only consider plans that also include a strong power-sharing agreement," the group added. "An agreement would disempower the Freedom Caucus and empower Democrats to meaningfully govern, mitigating Republican disarray. Any agreement would also need to be codified in the rules of the House."
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What Is Jim Jordan and Who Is MAGA?
The real drivers of the MAGA base—the ones the Ohio Republican was calling on to support his ultimately failed bid to become Speaker of the House—are financially successful people who are hungry for more power and wealth.
Oct 21, 2023
As GOP Congressman Jim Jordan tried (and failed for the third time) to claw his way up to Speaker of the House this week, he deployed the MAGA base to pressure those representatives who were reluctant to vote for him. Some extremist MAGA supporters even made death threats to fellow Republicans who didn’t support Jordan.
Who actually forms the backbone of this MAGA base that Jordan desperately turned to?
Media and social media enterprises have reinforced the idea that the MAGA base is composed of uneducated white working-class voters. Supposedly, these are the very voters who Hillary Clinton, as Democratic nominee for president in 2016, infamously described as a “basket of deplorables,” (racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist.) With the vivid images of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol burned into our national consciousness, if we’re honest, many of us now add ‘violent’ to Clinton’s picture of these working-class deplorables.
"These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves."
While researching Wall Street’s War on Workers, however, our Labor Institute team found compelling data that turns this image of the right-wing Republican base on its head. It is a destructive stereotype that doesn’t square with reality.
Let’s start with the Tea Party, which sprung to life in 2009. It is usually assumed that it was driven by disgruntled white working-class reactionaries who fundamentally resented intellectuals and the media. But a comprehensive study by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2012), provides an entirely different view of the socioeconomic status of Tea Party members:
“Tea Party supporters and activists are better-off economically and better educated than most Americans. . . . Most are not truly wealthy, however. Comfortable middle-class might be the best way to describe grassroots Tea Partiers.”
White? Yes, almost entirely so. Working class? Decidedly not, as defined by income, education, or occupation.
What about Republican primary voters? The 2018 Primaries Project at the Brookings Institution provides detailed profiles of Republican primary voters during the Trump presidency:
- They were disproportionately white compared to the rest of the country: 86.4 percent.
- They were better educated: Nearly 75% had a college degree, postgraduate study, or some college. Only 15% had finished high school or dropped out.
- They were richer: Republican primary voters were considerably richer than the rest of the population in their primary districts. For example, 26.9% of Republican primary voters (and 21.5% of the Democratic primary voters) had household incomes above $150,000 per year, compared to only 15.4% of the general population in the average district.
- They were also older than the general population.
How about the January 6th insurrectionists?
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago published demographic information on 656 of the 861 insurrectionists who, as of July 22,2022, had been charged with illegally entering the Capitol or Capitol grounds. The study found the following:
- 92% of the insurrectionists were white.
- 50% were white-collar employees or business owners.
- Only one-quarter were blue-collar (no college degree).
- And 25% had a college degree, slightly more than the 23.5% for the country as a whole.
The study does not say how many of the insurrectionists had graduate degrees, but we do know that the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes (sentenced to 18 years in prison for sedition and other charges for his January 6 activities), is a graduate of the ultra-elite Yale Law School, the same law school from which Bill and Hillary Clinton graduated.
January 6, 2021, was not a working-class riot.
To be sure, members of the working-class form a significant portion of the MAGA base, but not disproportionately so. Instead, we see that the true MAGA base is disproportionately higher-income, white-collar white people who are enthralled by MAGA politics. And when we step back a bit and look at the many conspiracists who organized, staffed, and drove the election lies, this makes sense. Nearly all are lawyers and businesspeople, many with advanced degrees, backed by a vast ultra-right media and social media ecosystem of highly educated influencers. You don’t find labor union activists leading the MAGA charge.
The real drivers of the MAGA base—the ones the Ohio Republican was calling on to support his ultimately failed bid to become Speaker of the House—are financially successful people who are hungry for more power and wealth. MAGA is their ticket to move up the political ladder, to amass greater influence, and to garner more resources for themselves.
These strivers don’t care all that much about ideology or issues or making America great again. What they care about first and foremost is the power and money they can gain for themselves. And precisely because they are not burdened by ideological consistency or deeply held principles, they rely on one overriding trait—a formidable will to power.
So, as many of us do, let’s not lay blame on white working people for the decline of our democracy or today’s rise of Jim Jordan. The authoritarian, oligarchical—yes, even violent—impulses of political life today are really the responsibility of a basket full of highly-educated elites. And because they are so unencumbered by principle, they are really dangerous.
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House GOP Drops Jordan's Speaker Candidacy After Third Failed Floor Vote
"It is embarrassing that MAGA House Republicans continue to let the petty sniping and infighting in their own party prevent them from working with the president," President Joe Biden's campaign said.
Oct 20, 2023
In what could be the final nail in the coffin of Ohio GOP Congressman Jim Jordan's speakership bid, U.S. House Republicans on Friday secretly voted to drop the far-right 2020 election denier's candidacy, leaving the fractured party without a nominee for the chamber's top job more than two weeks after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy's ouster.
The clandestine GOP move—in which 112 Republicans elected to drop Jordan and only 86 supported his bid—came after Jordan, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, on Friday failed to garner enough support in a third House floor vote on his proposed speakership.
Jordan lost three Republican supporters since the last roll call vote, finishing with 194 of 217 required votes. All Democrats present voted for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who received 210 votes.
"The third time was not the charm," said Emily Trifone, deputy communications director for the Democratic Attorneys General Association.
The Hill reported that the GOP conference on Thursday rejected a proposal to temporarily appoint Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), an apparent last-ditch attempt to resume House business during the unresolved struggle for a new leader.
Responding to the third failed vote on Jordan, McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, "We are in a very bad place right now."
In a statement, President Joe Biden's reelection campaign slammed "MAGA House Republicans' self-inflicted chaos and chronic inability to govern."
"It is embarrassing that MAGA House Republicans continue to let the petty sniping and infighting in their own party prevent them from working with the president on bipartisan national security priorities," the statement added. "Voters will remember how when world events called for American leadership, President Biden stepped up and MAGA House Republicans humiliated themselves and failed the American people."
It's back to the drawing board for House Republicans, who have until Sunday to declare speaker candidates ahead of Monday's scheduled restart of the selection process.
"It's a pleasure to get to vote against Jim Jordan every single day, but I never thought that would be my job," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) quipped on social media. "Come on GOP, let's get back to work."
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Jim Jordan Concedes Speaker Election—For Now—Backing More Power for Patrick McHenry
Republicans will hold an internal vote Thursday on whether to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), but some allies of Jordan indicated they would oppose the move.
Oct 19, 2023
Far-right U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, confronting two failed attempts to garner the support needed to be elected speaker of the House, intends to back a plan to empower Rep. Patrick McHenry—named speaker pro tempore earlier this month—to act as a temporary speaker until at least January 3, according to new reporting on Thursday.
The House held two votes for House speaker on Tuesday and Wednesday, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) securing the support of all 212 Democrats—putting him just five votes away from the leadership position—and Jordan losing support from the first vote to the second. Twenty of his Republican colleagues opposed his bid on Tuesday and 22 voted against him the following day.
The Ohio Republican, a close ally of former President Donald Trump and a key player in efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election, will attempt to build support for the remainder of the year if the party moves forward with the plan to empower McHenry (R-N.C.), who currently has no authority to conduct legislative business.
Jordan and allies who want to see him leading House Republicans have been accused of using "bullying" tactics in his effort to secure votes. The wife of Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) received messages threatening her husband's political career and accusing him of causing "chaos" and failing to be "a team player" after Bacon voted against Jordan.
Fox News interviews with Jordan opponents have had a similar tenor, while Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) reported receiving "credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls" and Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) said he and his family got similar threats.
Republicans planned to hold an internal vote on whether to empower McHenry, the House Financial Services Committee chair and a close ally of ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), on Thursday afternoon.
Jeffries told reporters that he and other Democrats are also considering backing McHenry, saying the party wants to "stop Jim Jordan, who is a clear and present danger to our democracy."
The minority leader told members of the party that they should only support elevating a temporary speaker if they voted to certify the 2020 election, have a record of "standing up to extremism" and "governing," and supported the debt ceiling deal reached by the Biden administration and McCarthy in May, which was condemned by progressives as it scaled back food and housing aid, educational funding, and an Internal Revenue Service budget increase meant to stop tax evasion by the wealthiest Americans.
Progressive strategist Sawyer Hackett cautioned against some suggestions that McHenry would lead the party as a so-called "moderate."
"Let's be crystal clear: Patrick McHenry is only moderate in contrast to Jim Jordan," said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "He's tightly interwoven with the biggest banks—from pushing to undercut tougher capital standards to critiquing the [Securities and Exchange Commission]."
"His loyalty lies with corporate America," Gilbert said. "Not with the American people."
Far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who led the effort to push McCarthy out of the speakership earlier this month and supported Jordan's bid, indicated he would not back the plan to empower McHenry.
Another Jordan ally, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), said the move would effectively "give the Democrats control of a Republican majority."
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Amid House Speaker Chaos, GOP Confess Attack on Social Security, Medicare Still Top Priority
"Raise your hand if you DON'T want a speaker of the House who is hellbent on cutting your hard-earned Social Security and Medicare," said one Democratic state lawmaker.
Oct 18, 2023
In the midst of the second vote on U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan's nomination to be the next House Speaker on Wednesday, one right-wing lawmaker cut through the Republican infighting to remind his fellow GOP members of the common goal they share: cutting programs that millions of Americans rely on to obtain healthcare and afford their day-to-day expenses.
Speaking in favor of the Jordan, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) called on his colleagues to recognize the Ohio Republican's so-called "courage" in fighting "to get at the real drivers of debt, and we all know what they are. We all know it's Social Security, we all know it's Medicare, we all know it's Medicaid."
Cole recalled how he and former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) offered a proposal to make changes to Social Security akin to those made in 1983, when benefits for retirees were effectively cut by 13%.
"We never could get any help," Cole lamented. "[Jordan] is the guy that wants to create a debt commission, a bipartisan debt commission and get at the roots of our spending problem. That takes courage."
Progressives have long warned that as soon as they win the White House and majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans will not hesitate to slash Social Security and Medicare spending, and the party itself regularly claims the two programs are bankrupting the federal government—all while voting in favor of hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending.
Since Social Security is funded almost entirely through contributions of workers and employers, explains the advocacy group Social Security Works, the program does not contribute to the national deficit and "can never go bankrupt... Even if Congress were to take no action, Social Security could pay 100% of promised benefits for the next 12 years, and more than three-quarters of benefits after that."
Jordan, the group said on social media Wednesday as it posted the following image, supports plans to cut benefits by raising the retirement age to 70.
Image of Rep. Jim Jordan(Photo: Social Security Works)
An Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found in April that 79% of Americans oppose reducing Social Security benefits and 67% oppose raising monthly premiums for Medicare, which Republicans have also proposed.
"Raise your hand if you DON'T want a speaker of the House who is hellbent on cutting your hard-earned Social Security and Medicare," tweeted Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90).
While Republicans are not yet united around a speaker, said Social Security Works, "they are united on destroying our earned Social Security and Medicare benefits."
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