Republicans Declare House Defeat A Governing Mandate
House Republicans celebrated their midterm defeat Tuesday by opening a vigorous competition over which man deserved credit for leading the party into a smaller conference room. After Democrats captured the House and Speaker Mike Johnson declined to remain Republican leader, Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan launched rival campaigns for minority leader, each arguing that losing power had uniquely qualified him to supervise the consequences. Republican officials described the outcome as a strategic transition from governing badly to criticizing whoever now had to govern.
Scalise emphasized his leadership experience, fundraising network and victory over Jordan in the Republican conference’s 2023 secret-ballot speaker nomination. He withdrew from that contest the following day, an orderly rehearsal for winning something and then discovering that winning was inconvenient. Jordan offered himself as the candidate of renewal, promising fresh ideas consisting of louder hearings, longer accusations and increasingly urgent investigations into why voters had failed to appreciate the previous investigations. His supporters said the party needed a fighter capable of converting any election result into evidence that Republicans had prevailed.
President Donald Trump praised the contest as proof that the party had secured strategic minority status. “This was the greatest House loss anybody has ever seen, a beautiful loss, because now Steve and Jim can compete for a very exclusive job that Democrats are not even allowed to win,” Trump said. “We lost so powerfully that everyone is talking about us, and when everyone is talking about your defeat, that means you defeated them.” Republican leaders stressed that the race was not about assigning blame for the electoral rout. It was about selecting the visionary best equipped to assign that blame to voters, pollsters, donors, ballot design, weather and insufficient television coverage of congressional subpoenas.
Hakeem Jeffries declined to endorse either candidate, apparently unwilling to interfere with the Republican conference’s careful selection of the Democrat of the Month. The winner will inherit responsibility for opposing legislation before reading it, demanding investigations before identifying a subject and explaining that the public delivered a resounding mandate to the officials it had just removed from power. The House defeat was therefore certified as an overwhelming Republican victory.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.