Jim Jordan Slinks Away After Week Of Humiliation

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, after suffering back-to-back defeats in his bid to become House Speaker, decided on Thursday that he was done being publicly humiliated and cancelled the scheduled vote for the day as he backs out of the race...for now. Republicans are not done with their Speaker battle, but they seem to understand that they actually need time to figure out who their leader is, so leaving the Speaker pro temp in charge for now appears to be their decision. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Well, folks, yesterday Thursday, Jim Jordan was of course supposed to face round three of voting after suffering massive humiliations. In rounds one and two. The round two defeat for Jim Jordan was actually even worse than the round one defeat. So Jim Jordan on Thursday officially called it quits, and he said he is going to back the plan by Republicans in the house to simply empower Patrick McHenry, who is serving as kind of the, uh, temporary speaker, the speaker pro tem. Uh, we'll just give him the power for now. We can pass legislation and then we'll come back to the speaker thing later. And then like 20 minutes later, all of that changed, right? Republicans went and they had a little meeting that got so heated that McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy started screaming at Matt Gaetz, one Republican congressman, uh, Patrick, uh, excuse me, not Patrick, Michael boast, allegedly lunged at Matt Gaetz.

So they emerged from their meeting after screaming, shouting, almost coming to, to physical blows and said, we're not gonna do the McHenry thing. So then this morning, Jim Jordan, who already bowed out, says, wait a minute, I'm back in this thing. I am going to hold another vote. I've been meeting with a couple of the holdouts. The talks went pretty well, so we're gonna do it again. So maybe we get a vote today, maybe we don't. Maybe we have a speaker. By the end of the day, maybe we don't. The Republicans in Congress don't know what the hell they're doing. Jim Jordan doesn't know what the hell he is doing. Is he gonna try a third time? Is he not? Who the hell knows? Because we're not dealing with serious people. We're definitely not dealing with smart people. We are dealing with the craziest of the crazies because earlier this year, Kevin McCarthy gave the keys to the clown car to Matt Gaetz and Matt Gaetz did what Matt Gaetz does while driving.

And, uh, things didn't end well as per usual, right? So here we are in this ridiculously stupid situation that ridiculously stupid Republicans put us in, and there's no end in sight. Even if Jim Jordan, you know, got some kind of deal with a couple of the holdouts, okay? You had 22 on your second vote that voted against you. You, you lost support between votes one and two. So at most, maybe you put yourself back where you were at the first vote, and, and that still is not enough to make you become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. I've never seen anything like this. This is both hilarious and terrifying because believe it or not, even with Republicans in charge of it, we still have to have a functioning House of Representatives.

Let's not forget last month, right when we averted the government shutdown, we didn't avert it for a year. We averted it for 45 days. We still have to pass the legislation to keep the government open, and we're now all this time away with Republicans unable to figure out who the hell their leader's gonna be for the next 12 months. We don't know. They don't know. They don't know what to do. They don't have support. And I gotta tell you, if Democrats cannot capitalize on this to take back the house next year, then I don't even know what's happening in politics anymore. Like I may just have to hang it all up at that point because this is the biggest gift the Democratic Party could ever get. The Republicans highlighting, showcasing, almost bragging about how dysfunctional they are and how incapable of leading this country they are.