Jim Jordan shouldn’t have gotten that far

Shame dies when there’s no pushback

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

Now that Twitter charges for Tweetdeck, its real-time update app, and I’d rather send an expensive charcuterie board to Ann Coulter than give Elon Musk a cent of my money, I no longer spend my days totally slack-jawed, watching the automated doom scroll unfold. Today, I spent a few solid hours doing work and running around the city without incessantly refreshing for updates on the nightmares unfolding both in the US and abroad.

Even small breaks can remind you that in spite of the spores of cynicism and disaffectedness that the internet spreads throughout your brain, there are so many tangible things in the world worth fighting for. And that’s helpful, especially during weeks like this one, when you return to the news and are immediately walloped by despair and unconscionable idiocy. To look at most headlines is to stare into the void, and it can become a black hole if you don’t keep one foot planted in the real world.

I’ve got a huge slate of stories for you tonight, includes need and analysis of the GOP psychodrama in Congress, the battle over democracy and voting rights, the people stealing health care from children, and more. I’m also working on a piece about the growing generational divide among American Jews over the war in Israel and Gaza, which I should have ready to send out tomorrow.

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It was a relief to see that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s sloppy pressure campaign fell well short of convincing enough of his colleagues to make him Speaker of the House, and funny to see him fail even harder during his second attempt at the throne. He’s still trying to cut some deals to win over the 20 or so Republicans he needs to flip to cross the finish line, but in the end, a career in Congress spent as an unproductive legislative terrorist and asshole is likely to doom him.

That kind of schadenfreude is energizing, but the karma that came back to bite him also points to a more troubling reality: It was largely only the personal animosity of some coworkers that kept such a scumbag from being third-in-line from the presidency, especially when the current occupant of the Oval Office is an 80-year-old man currently traveling through a war zone.

It shouldn’t have gotten to the point at which it required a sliver of conservatives to sink Jordan’s hopes of being made Speaker. Republicans should have been afraid to even speak off-the-record about the suggestion that a racist serial rape accomplice who worked feverishly to overturn a presidential election could be trusted with the gavel, while voting for him should have been considered something akin to career suicide.

Yet twice this week there have been nearly 200 Republicans that stood on the House floor and voted for him, and instead of facing any consequences, it was the holdouts who didn’t support the racist serial rape accomplice and insurrectionist who were cornered in the halls of the Capitol by reporters and forced to answer for themselves.

There are a few contributing factors to that dizzying inverse of political accountability, but it’s first and foremost a product of the drastic shift heralded by the 2016 election and the months that followed.

It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump is a singular figure whose election to the White House was a full paradigm shift, or simply the one-off product of a very specific set of circumstances, including a unique personal image forged over a half-century epitomizing a tantalizing-if-lurid strain of American zeitgeist. But when he eked out a victory in the Electoral College in spite of the various lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and the revelation of the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” recording, it sent the political media on a soul-searching sojourn to the mythical land of the Midwest diner.

Because so many voters had taken in Trump’s personality issues and still voted for him, it seemed to have signaled to the political media that deep moral failings, criminal activity, and outrageous behavior were now acceptable.

In horse-race coverage, winning tends to justify everything, and the ongoing fervent public support for Trump even as his presidency descended into a collction of failures has meant that other Republican sickos have also been granted immunity from scrutiny. If there is an assumption that base voters won’t care about personal scandals, they become baked into the equation and promptly ignored by those asking questions.

Democrats seem to have largely taken that same path of least resistance, allowing the political polarity to shift further to the right on a number of issues. For example, Rep. Summer Lee is the only member of Congress that I saw mention Jordan’s ongoing legal troubles with former Ohio State wrestlers who accuse him of covering up years of sexual assault by the team’s doctor, and even she had it buried in a tweet of talking points.

Without the diligence to raise these issues and report these blaring scandals and moral outrages, Republicans will only be further emboldened to empower their most fringe lawmakers without any fear of consequences. Next time, there may not be 20 Republicans who personally dislike some monster enough to block their ascendancy. Estimates of whether base voters will care should not determine the course of media coverage or history.