1 year ago
As House Republicans gear up for yet another chaotic fight to choose a leader, Democrats are preparing to make them pay for elevating Jim Jordan — with their majority.
It's not clear whether Jordan has the votes to become speaker, but Democrats are still racing to villainize the Ohio Republican, who cofounded the hardline Freedom Caucus. Democratic leaders lined up after Jordan won the House GOP's speaker election to slam him as an “insurrectionist,” citing his role in objecting to former President Donald Trump's 2020 loss, and Democratic campaign hands are already hitching swing-district Republican lawmakers to him.
Many Democrats see a possible Jordan speakership as essentially a sequel to the right-leaning agenda that Kevin McCarthy pushed during his nine months in control. But plenty of them see Jordan's rise as a potential gift ahead of next year's election, giving them a fresh chance to depict Republicans as rudderless and dysfunctional — not to mention helping turn the Ohioan into a symbol of Trump-first ultraconservatism, just as the GOP spent years casting former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a liberal bogeyman.
"If he wins, it’s not like putting a fox in the henhouse. It’s like blowing up the henhouse," said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), a previous head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
It's not every day that campaign messaging hinges on congressional inside baseball that might only confuse the average voter. With the GOP clinging to a four-seat majority, however, Democrats are betting that the electorate will understand that one chamber of Congress is shut down, and that the party behind it will get blamed. Putting a pro-Trump hardliner in charge of the House, as they see it, will only help that warning break through in 2024 — particularly against the 18 Republicans who have to defend seats in districts that President Joe Biden won.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a memo on Tuesday that directed lawmakers to highlight Jordan’s conservatism, declaring that “a Speaker Jordan means extremism and far-right priorities will govern the House of Representatives.”
"Chaos and dysfunction is what we've seen from the Republican caucus since this Congress started,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), chair of the House Democratic campaign arm. “There was no leadership. And people see that right now and expect better.”
As polarizing a figure as the former speaker became before his defenestration — Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) quipped that “Kevin McCarthy is Jim Jordan with a smile on his face" — Jordan counts even fewer friends on the other side of the aisle. His nearly nonexistent working relationships with Democrats make it easier for them to brand him as a chaos agent ahead of next month's looming government shutdown deadline.
And Democrats could use any advantage they can find ahead of 2024, given lingering economic malaise that’s complicated their efforts to campaign on the legislative accomplishments from their unified control of Washington during the first two years of Biden's presidency. Some top Democrats see the GOP's weekslong turmoil as making their arguments for them, particularly given the lack of legislative action on pressing crises like hostilities in the Middle East.
“We have the Israel situation. We have Ukraine. We have so many things that require us to pay attention. And instead, they are just showing how they're continuing to wallow in their incompetence [at] the specific single task of picking a speaker,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Other Democrats are open about about how easy it will be to turn Jordan into a liability on the campaign trail.
“A pedophile insurrectionist — seriously? That's the face of their party?" marveled Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.), the chair of the centrist New Democrats. (Kuster's gibe is a reference to an Ohio State University sexual abuse scandal that ensnared Jordan, who has denied any knowledge of the underlying misdeeds.)
The party is already putting some money behind the message of GOP legislative chaos. The party arm dedicated to state-level races is tying Virginia lawmakers to the dysfunction ahead of the state’s elections, as is House Majority Forward, a nonprofit with links to Democratic leadership.
On top of that, Democratic admakers are salivating at the votes some vulnerable Republicans took in the final days of McCarthy's speakership, when he pressed House Republicans to back a stopgap funding bill that would have imposed nearly 30-percent cuts to non-defense spending.
Democrats plan to hang several campaign-season attacks on the text of that bill, including a spotlight on Republicans who voted to cut Social Security and decrease funding for law enforcement and FBI agents — as they see it, a GOP plan to “defund the police."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had pitched a bipartisan coalition government with the GOP, but there haven’t been any serious takers on the right. Democrats are expected to uniformly back Jeffries on Tuesday, with party lawmakers eagerly pointing out that they only needed minutes to embrace their leader while Republicans have taken weeks to pick one.
A few senior Democrats are almost inclined to let the GOP's flailing speak for itself rather than spend time trying to turn the mess into a campaign issue.
“I think that this kind of self-destructive behavior and everything that's facing us, that's a campaign issue in itself,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said. “So I don't know how you flame that anymore.”
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