Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Representative Jim Jordan (MAGA-Ohio) is a turd with arms and legs.  He is trying to impeach President Biden for no apparent reason.  He stands against everything and for nothing.  As an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University back in the late eighties and early nineties, he did nothing to stop sexual abuse going on in the wrestling program despite firsthand knowledge of it.  He wants a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, opposes legal abortion, and once said the quiet part out loud about why he and other Republicans oppose high-speed passenger rail (which we're never getting anyway, so it doesn't matter and what if it did?) - because it discourages new-car sales.  He is, in a word, the very sort of fellow who reminds people all over the world why they despise white male Americans so much.  

And yet, he's likely to be Speaker of the House by week's end. 

Jordan (shown here in a rare portrait if him with his suit coat on) is running to be the Republican nominee for Speaker of the House, the third highest and second most powerful elective office in the country, with House Republican leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana his only real competition.   Jordan, as Speaker, would likely push not only his reactionary policy positions on the House but also add extra win dinthe sails of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, making the possibility of Trump's return to power more of a likelihood.  Also, he opposes military funding for Ukraine, Scalise is a tad less extreme - but only a tad - and he is on board with Senate Republicans in supporting Ukraine's war against the invading Russians.  But deciding who you'd rather have as Speaker of the House - Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan - is sort of like deciding whether to see Battlefield Earth or Glitter for a movie night at home. 

Democrats, of course, have to nominate a candidate for Speaker as well, and some of them have suggested forming a coalition with anti-Trump Republicans to get behind a consensus Republican candidate - former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, for example - in an effort to block Jordan.  (You don't have to be a current or even former member of the House to Speaker; anyone can be chosen for the job.)   So the likeliest scenario will be for the Democrats to nominate their House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, an urge anti-Trump Republicans to put country over party and help Jeffries win the speakership.

Right.  Republicans - even so-called "moderates" outside the MAGA faction - voting for a black guy from Brooklyn who grew up on hip-hop.  Sure.  And, Republicans will inevitably say, isn't his Uncle Leonard a pan-Africanist who insists that the deep reservoir of melanin in the skin of Negroes makes them intellectually, morally, and culturally superior to Caucasians?   

Looking at the House Republican caucus of late, there may actually be something to that theory.