Legislative terrorists
By 
Gym Jordan is a plausible Speaker because an unwillingness to govern has become more and more central to the ethos of the Republican Party:
But make no mistake: Whatever institutionalization and maturation Jordan has undergone, the Jim Jordan of 2010 and 2020 looms. Plenty about his conduct today indicates that the Freedom Caucus bomb-thrower still resides within him and could drive the GOP even further to the right.
The fact that Jordan is a viable option appears to be less about his own evolution than the Republican Party’s.
That’s something that Jordan himself has pointed to, while acknowledging he has learned to play nicer with GOP colleagues. His office cited recent comments in which Jordan said, “I’m the same guy I always was.”
“I was fighting for the same things 10 to 12 years ago that I’m fighting for now,” he said last week on Fox News, when asked whether he had changed.
He added: “What I have really figured out is, if we don’t come together, I don’t know how you stop where the left wants to go.”
For much of the 2010s, Jordan was a key leader of GOP efforts to push the government toward shutdowns while holding out for concessions. That was the case in 2013 when it was about defunding Obamacare, in 2015 when it was about Planned Parenthood funding, and in 2018 when it was about the border wall.
In the last instance, Jordan was more intent even than fellow members of the Freedom Caucus to force the issue. The result was the longest shutdown in history.
“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together,” former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) wrote in his 2021 book, which lumped his Ohio colleague in with other “legislative terrorists.”
Whether he can get the nearly-unanimous majority of his conference to go along remains an open question, of course. But don’t worry, Kevin McCarthy is sitting in the cloakroom waiting to kiss your ass and call it waygu ribeye!