Mad House by Annie Karni & Luke Broadwater

Author:Annie Karni & Luke Broadwater [Karni, Annie & Broadwater, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2025-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

20

My brand is “fighter.”

—Jim Jordan

For Don Bacon, the folksy center-leaning Republican from Nebraska, Jim Jordan’s behavior the day Steve Scalise won the internal party vote was, in one word, “dishonorable.”

Bacon didn’t have any serious moral objections to Jordan. He thought he had done a decent job as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and he would have supported Jordan “reluctantly” if he had emerged from the secret ballot with the support of the majority of the conference. But he hadn’t.

“The way he treated Steve Scalise wasn’t right,” Bacon told people. It was a reminder that so much of what happens, or doesn’t, in Congress comes down to its being a large body of people simply having human, emotional reactions to one another. That wasn’t necessarily new, but it took on greater prominence in people’s thinking when there was no substance to mitigate the personal grievances and petty fights that can easily consume all of us.

“I can’t get past the fact that those five guys said they wouldn’t back Scalise, and you were in the room and said nothing. It wasn’t right,” Bacon told Jordan when he asked him for his support. “I don’t think it’s honorable.”

Another holdout was Ken Buck, who said he could not vote for Jordan on the House floor because of Jordan’s deep involvement in the planning and execution of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which had resulted in a deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6. Buck prepared for a meeting with Jordan by taking a copy of the House January 6 Committee’s final report and marking it up with all the references to his involvement on that day.

Trump and Jordan had spoken for ten minutes on the phone the morning of January 6 and again later that day. On January 5, Jordan texted Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, to tell him that Vice President Mike Pence should “call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.” (Jordan says he was merely passing on advice from a conservative lawyer.)

Sitting with Buck in his office now, trying to win him over, Jordan didn’t have much to say in response to these charges. “He said, ‘Well, that’s not true’ and ‘That’s only partially true’ and ‘That’s kind of true,’ ” Buck recalled of the meeting. “I said, ‘Okay, but the bottom line is the perception out there is more than anybody else on the Hill, you are the Republican who was interacting with the Trump administration.’ ”

Buck was firm in his rejection of Jordan, who had also sidelined him on the Judiciary Committee. “I can’t support you,” he told him. “I will vote ‘present’ if I’m the deciding vote, but I just can’t vote for you on this.”

The opposition was dug in. But unlike Scalise, Jordan was not one to drop out without a fight. Doing so would cut against his public persona, and it’s not how the MAGA base expected him to conduct himself. “My brand is ‘fighter,’ ” he insisted to his colleagues.

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