--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hoyer. Jeffries. Hoyle of Oregon. Jeffries. Hudson. Jordan. Hakeem Jeffries is not trying to be the Speaker of the House. Not right now, at least. But Hakeem Jeffries keeps getting the most votes to be Speaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It happened on Tuesday. The Honorable Jim Jordan of the state of Ohio has received 200 votes. The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries of the state of New York has received 212 votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It happened again on Wednesday. The Honorable Jim Jordan of the state of Ohio has received 199. The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries of the state of New York has received 212.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The only problem with Hakeem Jeffries getting the most votes is that he's a Democrat, and Republicans actually control the United States House of Representatives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Democrats are united. The Republicans have never looked more fractured.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What to do about an even more broke-than-usual Congress? Coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's attio.com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The house will be in order. The clerk may call the roll. Today, yay. Explained. Yay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we last covered Congress, it was to tell you about the fall of Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We mentioned Steve Scalise. His number two was the likely candidate for the job.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That did not go well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which brings us to an unlikely candidate for the job, Jim Jordan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Jim Jordan has long been kind of the leader of the far-right extremist faction of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He's been in the House since 2006, and as soon as Republicans won a majority in the 2010 midterms, that was the big Tea Party wave, he went about kind of trying to transform that Tea Party energy into a strategy to disrupt the ordinary functioning of American government in an effort to push policy to the right.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're not going to support borrowing more money. We're not going to support raising the debt ceiling. This is out of control.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In the Obama administration, these battles were mainly about spending.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Republican House members have essentially said that the only way they'll vote to prevent America's first ever default is if the rest of us agree to their deep spending cuts only approach.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They spurred a debt ceiling crisis in 2011 and the government shutdown in 2013.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: All this time, he was a constant thorn in the side of Speaker John Boehner, who would later, after Boehner himself resigned, compare Jordan to a legislative terrorist.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart and never building anything, never putting anything together.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He didn't have a lot of love from the party establishment, to put it mildly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he also was building another power base for himself on investigations in the House.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: State Department experts knew the truth. You knew the truth. But that's not what the American people got.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So he quickly distinguished himself on the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee as one of the fiercest, toughest questioners.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Why didn't you tell the American people exactly what you told the Egyptian prime minister?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Always like snarling with condescension about any Obama administration officials coming before him, investigating things like the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, I think if you look at the statement that I made, I clearly said that it was an attack.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I also said that there were some who tried to justify it on the basis of the video, Congressman.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I think it's—
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But real quick, calling it an attack is like saying the sky's blue. Of course it was an attack.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then continuing forward, once Donald Trump became president, he kind of switched to become an all-out defender of Trump against any investigations from the U.S. Justice Department.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Did the Democrats publish phone records of a member of the press? Yes, who was also involved in this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Did the Democrats publish phone records of a member of Congress? Yes, who was talking to people involved.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Did the Democrats, did that member of Congress also happens to be your boss's political opponent that those phone records were published of?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He became a big critic of Robert Mueller back before so many Republicans were doing that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so this kind of helped make him a champion of the right.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So he had this kind of two-pronged focus.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: One was screwing up Republican leaders' strategy on funding the government and the ordinary business of government spending in an effort to force far more right-wing policy that never ended up working.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And two was just being the partisan warrior who was kind of leading the right and their causes when it came to these investigations.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Jordan actually tried to get the top Republican leadership position once before This was in 2018 and he ran against Kevin McCarthy He lost in a landslide
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And after that McCarthy told him he had a choice to make Jordan really wanted to become the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee and then later the House Judiciary Committee, giving him even more investigative power.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But McCarthy said, if you want that, you need to agree to stop embarrassing leaders, namely me, and be more of a team player and stop screwing up our strategy on these spending fights.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Jordan basically agreed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if we carry it forward into this year, Jordan didn't make trouble for McCarthy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was a loyal ally and McCarthy valued that loyalty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He valued Jordan's loyalty more reportedly than his own number two, Steve Scalise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When Scalise and Jordan were running against each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: McCarthy seemed to prefer Jordan, and he's been notably publicly more enthusiastic about Jordan's run than Scalise's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This morning, whiplash on Capitol Hill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Congressman Steve Scalise dropping out of the race for speaker just one day after being nominated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our conference still has to come together, and it's not there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Scalise was scrambling to secure the votes, meeting with Republicans behind closed doors for hours.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in the end, it wasn't enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, so Jordan's got at least some of McCarthy's backing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does that help him when his speakership comes to the House floor this week?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before going to the floor, the Republicans took another internal secret conference vote about how many people would really be against Jim Jordan if he went to the House floor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at that time, 55 Republicans said they would oppose Jordan, which is like far, far short of the near unanimity he needs within the GOP conference to become speaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when he went to the floor for the first time on Tuesday, he ended up with 200 Republican votes, which is – it's not as bad as 55 defections.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It turned out to be 20 defections.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he could only afford to really have three or four, depending on if everyone showed up, voting against him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it wasn't as bad as it initially seemed, but he still was pretty far short of what he actually needed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then they took another vote midday Wednesday and same basic story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He got a little further away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, 22 Republicans voted against him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of votes for Jordan are being cast through gritted teeth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People don't really like the way he handled his kind of showdown with Scalise.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, after Scalise had prevailed in the internal conference vote, he asked Jordan for his support.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And according to one report of the conversation in Politico, Jordan basically said, you'll have me for one ballot and then you need to withdraw and endorse me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he told Scalise, America wants me before storming out of the room.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm glad these grownups are in charge of our government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So after that, as Jordan has been trying to line up the votes, he's kind of unleashed the right wing base to really go after and pressure the holdouts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If that's how if he becomes speaker, that's the way that he's going to get his policies through.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He'll he will intimidate you or his followers will intimidate you into doing some things you may not want to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I, for one, I'm not going to fall for it. I'm a no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These holdouts, they are kind of a mixed group of Republicans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of them represent swing districts and they fear politically a Jordan speakership would make them look bad in their districts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some are members of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and they don't like Jordan's attempt to basically overhaul government spending policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They like their control over government spending policy and their ability to direct it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And perhaps they are defense hawks as well, and they don't like Jordan's support of cutting defense spending either.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he has this opposition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's unleashing the right-wing base on them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's not a way to win love and loyalty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's been trying to bully and intimidate his way to 217 votes, the exact amount he needs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at least in the second ballot, he didn't make any progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, he got further away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like America maybe doesn't want him, Andrew.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: America, which in the coinage of Trump and his supporters generally means, you know, the most extreme right wing people in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your favorite president, Donald J. Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does this mean for our government right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a lot going on in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a lot going on in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is Jim Jordan going to call another vote?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is anything getting done?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nothing is moving through the House of Representatives right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've been at a dead halt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They can't pass any bills until they choose a speaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At least that is the position currently of the person who is temporarily in charge right now, Patrick McHenry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chair declares the House on recess, subject to the call of the chair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is our friend with the bow tie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, yes, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, known for always wearing sharp looking bow ties.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's currently filling the speaker role on a temporary basis while the House selects a new speaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's now looking like it might not be so temporary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As of midday Thursday, Jordan himself had reportedly told Republicans in private that he now supported a proposal to give McHenry the powers of the speakership until January 2024.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jordan is not giving up yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He wants to take another shot at winning the speaker's election, but he doesn't yet have the vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he's basically saying, let's try it again in January.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jordan would still be waiting in the wings trying to give it another shot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the current plan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will it actually hold up?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll have to find out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Listener, believe me when I tell you that literally hours after Andrew told us about Jim Jordan's current plan, it changed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jim Jordan is now saying he going to call another vote It be his third Only 13 more to go to beat your buddy Kevin record Jimmy
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyway more with Andrew on how we get out of this mess when we back on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Explain is back with Andrew Prokop from Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew, the last time we talked about this mess in Congress on this show, you know, I asked whether Democrats were partly to blame here for helping create this kerfuffle to begin with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But now it feels like it's on the Republicans to resolve it and they're not having any luck.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that say about this Republican Party right now?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The Republican Party is deeply divided.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There is a kind of extreme hardline faction that is temperamentally unsuited to the realities of governing and having power.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the vast majority of the Republican Party agrees that, you know, the government needs to be funded because, you know, it provides important services to the American people, but also because the party will look really bad politically if it shuts down and they get the blame.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: History has shown that generally Republicans do get blamed when they force government shutdowns with these hardline tactics.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: According to our latest poll, 53 percent of Americans blame President Trump and Republicans for the stalemate.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Twenty nine percent blame congressional Democrats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Another issue that's been really splitting the party is Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The far right, kind of the MAGA right, has turned really hard against further military aid to Ukraine and they want to cut him off.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A majority of the majority does not support additional financial assistance to Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But there's still a sizable mainstream Republican foreign policy faction that says, no, it's important to keep arming Ukraine because they are waging a righteous struggle and resistance against Russia, who is one of our rivals.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I would say that support is still very strong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this delegation is bipartisan, very strong support for Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's another big issue, splitting the party.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then there are, you know, conservative members in conservative districts who only are ever thinking about threats from the right, primaries they might face from the right versus swing district members.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I believe there are 18 Republicans right now representing districts Joe Biden won in 2020.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They need to appeal to a certain amount of voters who voted for Joe Biden or else they're going to lose their seats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So naturally, they are less inclined to support crazy, extreme right wing stuff.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If this whole episode in Congress right now is evidence of anything, it's that the far right has sort of discovered its power in the Republican conference.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Have the moderates been able to discover anything about themselves in the intervening weeks?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think that discovery happened this week.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, we've seen the far right make it very difficult for McCarthy to be elected speaker.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We've seen the far right take him out.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Last week, we saw the far right torch Steve Scalise's speakership bid.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There was much speculation in Washington about, oh, there are all these – whether you call them moderates or mainstream Republicans, swing district members, people with a variety of concerns about Jordan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But would they really stand up to the right? Would they really stand up to the pressure campaign from conservative media and going into the vote Tuesday?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There was a big question.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Relatively few Republicans had said publicly that they would oppose Jordan. on the floor.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But then it turned out 20 of them did.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Representative Marionette Miller-Meeks of Iowa told me that she would only back Jordan on the first ballot.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And on the second ballot, she would decline to back him unless he made major changes, instead pushing for a unity candidate with Democrats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So that was perhaps a watershed moment in which there was the moderates kind of sending the message, hey, we can do this too.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We are not just going to fold and let you run the show every time.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is the rest of the Republican Party or at least enough of them saying actually we are not going to stand for this at least not yet
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's very interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a broad spectrum of views within the Democratic Party from, you know, the most moderate members to the squad in the House.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yet when push came to shove, when they did have a House majority, the squad was totally willing to support Biden's legislative priorities when their votes actually mattered and when they faced a choice between pushing policy to the left but not as far left as they want.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: or doing nothing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is power in this Congress in having a willingness and a tolerance for doing nothing, just letting the debt ceiling be breached.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They said, well, screw this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We fundamentally reject the standard assumptions of how Washington governance should work, and we're happy to burn the place down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The GOP bearing most of the blame right now, but the big question, is it enough to change their approach.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yeah.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And George, so far, this public pressure is not making them blink.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because partisanship is so strong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Polarization is so strong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There's so little desire to work with Democrats and a lot of fear of the political consequences of working with Democrats that the far right has essentially been able to steer the Republican Party strategy for much of the year, arguably for several years.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, the far right of the Republican Party, if they're to be believed on their faces, they want some real reform in Congress.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They want to dramatically rethink how Congress spends money, what Congress spends money on.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They want real change.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And we are showing the American people that this process works.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're not going to take any more of Washington being broken.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're going to do something for the American people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels like in this moment, Congress could use real change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know if it should be that change, but it seems like there's some dysfunction and paralysis here that needs to be shaken up.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Is there any possibility that something gets better as a result of all this dysfunction, or does it only get worse from here?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The problem is that the far right's demands and vision is just totally unrealistic given the current balance of power.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They're never going to get anywhere near anything they want with Democrats in charge of the Senate and the White House.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, even when Trump was in charge and Republicans controlled the Senate and the House in 2017 and 2018, they didn't get anything near where they wanted.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The issue is, will the far right moderate their demands and come closer to reality?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Or will they be kind of cut loose entirely by the majority of the Republican Party that says, all right, we've We've tried it with these guys.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We just can't with them.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Like, we have to fund the government.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We have to keep things working.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the only way to do that is with Democratic votes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so we're going to have to work with Democrats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that's just how it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What if the moderate Republicans, of which there are many more than the far-right Republicans, got together with the Democrats and just made Hakeem Jeffries the speaker and got a bunch of stuff done?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I know there are traditional Republicans who are good women and men who want to see government function, but they are unable to do it within the ranks of their own conference, which is dominated by the extremist wing.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that's why we continue to extend the hand of bipartisanship to them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would disagree with the premise that there are a lot more moderate Republicans than far right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, if it's purely in relative terms, then that's true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The far-right faction is not gigantic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Republicans are deeply conservative and there has been – polarization is a very real phenomenon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The distance between the furthest left Republican and the furthest right Democrat is still pretty large.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of these Republicans have to win Republican primaries in which only Republicans are voting and they could face a right-wing challenger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone is looking over their shoulder because of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And more than that, there's this whole ecosystem of partisanship, these whole social worlds, fundraising worlds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everything about their career and their identity is based on being Republicans and being part of the Republican team and crossing over to the Democrat team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's such a betrayal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's such a big move.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Very few people historically have wanted to go that far.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And cutting a deal with Jeffries would absolutely be viewed as that sort of betrayal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the way you get a compromise speaker is probably, I don't know how likely it is, but the path to it would be most Republicans and a relatively small amount of Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because no Republican will want to seem like they've sold out to Jeffries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No Republican will want to seem like they're just putting the left in charge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They want a Republican speaker and then maybe a couple dozen Democratic votes to get them over the finish line because the far right is just too recalcitrant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know how you get from where we are now to that outcome, but that's what I could see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can't really see a dozen Republicans quitting the party, essentially, and joining with all Democrats to make Jeffrey's speaker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Procop, Andrew, Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our program today was produced by Halima Shah and Siona Petros.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They had help from Matthew Collette, David Herman, and Tian Nguyen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
