Jim Jordan Is Officially Off The Table As A Candidate For Speaker Of The House, Leading To Much Schadenfreude

The Second House Speaker Election of 2023 is on its way to becoming just as much of a circus as the first one, as right-wing Speaker candidate Jim Jordan lost his third run at the Speakership this morning and, according to recent reports, will no longer be nominated for Speaker by the Republican Party.

A quick recap of how we got here: After Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his role as Speaker by a group of far-right Republicans led by Matt Gaetz, Republicans needed to be unified in order to elect a new Speaker with their slim majority in the House of Representatives. Their top two choices were Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan.

In a closed-door meeting last week, the majority of Republicans – but not all – voted for Scalise to be the nominee, and Scalise, seeing that he did not have the necessary votes to win the Speakership, dropped out. Jordan, apparently unperturbed by his purported lack of popularity, decided to take his candidacy to the House floor.

Over the course of this week, he lost three elections, each time losing more Republican support. The third vote was held this afternoon, and 25 Republicans voted against Jordan. In another closed-door meeting, Republicans agreed, reportedly by a wide margin, that Jordan would no longer be the nominee.

Jordan was staunchly opposed by Democrats in the House and apparently by some of his colleagues. Jordan to this day asserts that the 2020 Election was stolen and voted against certifying the election results. This made him the preferred candidate of Donald Trump, who endorsed him, but rubbed at least some of his Republican colleagues the wrong way.

It didn't help that Republicans who voted against Jordan reportedly received death threats from anonymous sources for refusing to back the Ohio Republican.

Numerous MAGA followers online were seemingly very upset that Jordan will not be the Speaker of the House, blaming the cabal of RINO Republicans representing "The Swamp" for blocking Jordan's ascent to the powerful position.

On the other side of the aisle, many social media users celebrated that Jordan would not be Speaker, piling on schadenfreude via memes and jokes as another Republican who voted against certifying the election (McCarthy did the same) would not be Speaker of the House.

The House will reconvene on Monday to do this all again. Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee for Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, has gotten 212 votes, six shy of the 218 needed, for the eighteenth time this year.