WASHINGTON—House Speaker nominee Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the mega Trumpite, was more involved in the planning for Donald Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol invasion, insurrection, and attempted coup d’état than anyone realizes.
So says former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. And she should know.
Cheney was the lead prosecutor, for lack of a better description, of the House Select Committee investigating the invasion. Defying her party’s Trumpite legions—including Jordan—she also had voted to impeach former Oval Office occupant Trump.
Already a right-winger in her own right, Cheney wasn’t Trumpist enough for the Republican Party’s increasingly fascistic leadership, and they engineered the loss of her U.S. House seat.
Drawing on the Jan. 6 committee’s evidence, Cheney says Jordan helped plan the insurrection.
“There’s going to be a Speaker’s race that involves Jim Jordan,” she started out at her latest speech about the Trumpite threat to constitutional democracy, at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs on Oct. 17.
Before starting in on the threat, Cheney paused to grimace, look away for a beat, and then lift her eyebrows. “There’s a lot I can say about Jim Jordan,” Cheney began. Though she didn’t say so, Jordan defied a select committee subpoena to testify.
“But in all seriousness, Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.
“Jim Jordan was involved in the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election results,” including the insurrection, Cheney continued.
“People have said that it was [House] Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault” because “security was not enough” against the Trumpite invaders. The committee found that the excuse was wrong.
“There were probably a handful of people” among the House Republicans “who knew” about the threat. “But he [Jordan] was the leader who knew what Donald Trump had planned.”
“Now somebody needs to ask Jim Jordan ‘Why didn’t you report to the Capitol Police what you knew Donald Trump had planned?’” Cheney said to one of many rounds of applause—including one before she began.
“You were in those meetings in the White House.”
Cheney said she didn’t think the party would elect Jordan to the House’s top job. But if it does, the entire Republican Party becomes instantly untrustworthy, she warned.
“If it were to happen, I don’t think there would be any possible way to say ‘A group of elected
Republicans could be trusted to defend the Constitution.’ The threat hasn’t gone away.”
Jordan, meanwhile, went 0-for-3 on the first three votes for the Speakership, losing votes each time and falling ever farther from the 217 he needs in the 433-member U.S. House.
Jordan refuses to pull out, leaving complete chaos doubled and tripled after two weeks without a Speaker and with no business transacted at all. There was a move afoot to expand Rep. Patrick McHenry’s powers as acting Speaker, so he could move legislation through the evenly divided House. That hit resistance, too.
And several Republicans who opposed Jordan reported being threatened, or having their families threatened, by angry Trumpites whipped up by outside commentators. Those threats only angered the targets and made them even more opposed to the Ohioan’s Speakership bid.
That’s important because key issues loom on the horizon: Democratic President Joe Biden’s request for $105 billion in weapons for Israel and Ukraine and the Nov. 17 deadline for Congress to approve a money bill, called a continuing resolution, to keep the government going and its lights on.
Regardless of which Republican eventually wins the Speaker’s chair, that lawmaker will be beholden not only to the right-wingers who now rule the House GOP but to the corporate special interests lurking behind them.
For example, OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign financing and lobbying spending, reports McHenry, now chair of the House Financial Services Committee, raised half of his campaign cash in the last election cycle from corporate campaign finance committees ($1.947 million) and another third from individual big givers. Small donors accounted for only 0.2%.
Banks, securities firms, investment houses, and other financiers had McHenry in their financial pockets. Their campaign finance committees tossed in $785,520 of the total figure and their individual big givers added $756,165.
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