Of course, leave it to Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan to say something ignorant and downplay what happened with a novel theory of originalism. On Fox News Sunday, Jordan said:
"Kevin McCarthy got the same number of votes that (Nancy) Pelosi got. She had the same majority number, 222, that we have this time. So sometimes democracy is messy. But I would argue that's exactly how the Founders intended it. They wanted real debate, real input from all people and then you get a decision."
In 2015, Jordan led the effort to help defeat McCarthy, the establishment choice for speaker, after the Freedom Caucus forced out Speaker John Boehner. This time around, Jordan backed McCarthy and acted as an emissary to those Freedom Caucus members who didn’t trust the California representative. Jordan is set to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee where he will act like an elephant in a china shop by investigating all kinds of conspiracy theories.
RELATED STORY: House Republicans are firing up the Jim Jordan show, and it's going to be ugly
McCarthy made so many concessions in the speakership battle that it would seem that the Freedom Caucus should have more influence than ever before. But at the same time, the fight revealed that the far-right caucus itself is in some disarray, raising questions of whether they can take advantage of the opportunity.
The Washington Post wrote on Sunday:
The McCarthy episode exposed not just a fault in the broader GOP conference of 222 Republicans, but also a deepening rift within today’s version of the Freedom Caucus. On one side sit the more senior members like Jordan, who was first elected in 2006 and is poised to chair the Judiciary Committee, as well as Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), an eight-year incumbent who serves on McCarthy’s leadership team.
They remain deeply conservative but they don’t quite hold the burn-everything-down ethos of the caucus’s earliest days, as they now stand to actually hold power once the House gets up and running.
On the other side sit relative newcomers such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who embrace the model that Meadows perfected, using social media and Fox News appearances to draw attention to their cause.
Of the 20 Republicans who repeatedly voted for a conservative alternative to McCarthy, just three have served more than three terms. ...
The conservatives fractured even further Friday after two-thirds of the group broke apart to support McCarthy during afternoon votes. The final bloc of six holdouts put McCarthy through one more humiliation late Friday, before finally letting him win on the 15th ballot early Saturday, the most since before the Civil War.
And a new battle is shaping up over the House rules package in which McCarthy made concession after concession to the Freedom Caucus that would make it difficult to pass even common-sense legislation. The question now is how many “moderate” Republicans will join with a united Democratic front to reject the rules package.
RELATED STORY: House ready to move into next potentially bruising battle over rules package
Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas has already indicated his opposition.
And on Sunday, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina called Gaetz “a fraud” and threatened to vote against the rules package.
And Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman, says the whole debacle indicates that McCarthy can’t get no respect from his caucus. Asked on MSNBC’s The Sunday Show whether he was surprised by the troubles McCarthy has faced and will continue to face, Steele replied:
"Oh, hell no, no, no! Look, I will tell you, one member of the caucus summed it up for me perfectly. This was a while ago when he said, 'Kevin McCarthy is the Ted Cruz of the House.' So if you want to know how the members feel about Kevin McCarthy, that's all you need to know.
"The reality is that they don't like him, they did not want him for the job, nobody else stood to take it, nobody else would take it. I guess if you win by default after 15 ballots, after all of the money that you raised for candidates, and you think because you raise the money that they like you and want you for your leader, then yes, this is what it looks like."
Meanwhile, it’s Democrats in array as all 212 members of the caucus voted ballot after ballot for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. And their confidence that they had made the right pick for leader was reinforced watching McCarthy grow smaller and smaller in stature as Jeffries delivered his inspirational “A to Z” speech before handing over the speaker’s gavel.
And one more time:
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