Jim Jordan gives defiant speech before third House speaker vote: Live

Mr Jordan held a short press conference on Friday morning, lasting only about ten minutes and taking few questions from reporters.

“Between the first one and the second vote, you all said we’re gonna lose 10, 15 votes,” Mr Jordan told the press. “We picked up a few we lost a few. I think the ones we lost can come back. So look, there’s been multiple rounds of votes for speaker before.”

On the first vote, 20 Republicans voted against Mr Jordan, and 22 did so on the second. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy took 15 rounds of voting before he managed to get across the line in January.

Rep Jim Jordan began his press conference by telling the story of the evolution of flight, speaking about his visit to tour the Wright Brothers’ homes.

“I represent Wapakoneta, Ohio Auglaize County, Ohio hometown of Neil Armstrong, who 22 years after Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier steps on the moon. Stop and think about it. In 66 years, one lifetime, we went from two guys flying 100 feet to putting a man on the moon,” Mr Jordan said. “It is a great country, a great country, the greatest country in my judgment made up of great people. And right now those people I think, are starting to doubt and wonder about their government and about where our nation is headed.”

“They see an open border. They see crime in the streets. They know what it costs to put gas in their car. They know what it costs to put food on the table. They see a war in Israel, our strongest ally Israel. What’s happening there and the help that Israel needs,” Mr Jordan said.

Mr Jordan holds few legislative accomplishments and he criticised leaders in his own party as often as he criticised the Obama administration and Democrats. Rather than focusing on the work of governing, he focused more on raising his objections in the media.

After Republicans won the majority in the House of Representatives, he turned down a position on the House Appropriations Committee, which allocates money to various programmes and has long been considered the most prestigious committee in the House. Rather, he chose to lead the Republican Study Committee, an ideologically conservative focused on advancing conservative policies.

In 2013, he and a handful of Tea Party conservatives teamed up with Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) in an effort to shut down the government if Congress did not defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The effort would never be successful since Democrats controlled the Senate at the time and Mr Obama still occupied the White House. But it burnished Mr Jordan’s credentials as a conservative warrior.

In 2015, he became the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, serving as its inaugural chairman. Ultimately, his colleague Mark Meadows, a congressman from North Carolina who would go on to serve as White House chief of staff, filed a motion to vacate the chair during John Boehner’s tenure as speaker. The vote never came but it was enough to end Mr Boehner’s time as speaker. Later, Mr Boehner would criticise his tactics. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” before dubbing him “a legislative terrorist”.

The Republican conference meeting grew heated following the announcement that Rep Jim Jordan is relaunching his campaign for the gavel after putting a pause on his speakership bid.

Rep Kevin McCarthy, the recently ousted speaker, reportedly screamed at Rep Matt Gaetz, who brought the motion to vacate against Mr McCarthy earlier this month, to sit down and Rep Michael Bost was seen “almost lunging at him,” a person who was in the room told Axios.

Mr Jordan backtracked on a pause on his speakership bid on Thursday (19 October), announcing in the afternoon that the members of the House GOP had rejected a temporary solution to empower interim speaker Patrick McHenry until January.

“We made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get back to work. We decided that wasn’t where we’re gonna go. I’m still running for speaker and I plan to go the floor and get the votes and win this race,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner.

According to Punchbowl News, Majority Whip Tom Emmer said: “As I have made very clear over the last few days, we should never allow a Democrat-backed coalition government. Ever. The only coalition we should be looking to build is a Republican coalition uniting all of our conference.”

Rep Jim Jordan is pushing ahead with a third vote to become the next speaker of the House of Representatives today following heated talks among House GOP members on Thursday night.

Despite losing two votes and doubts remaining that he will be able to meet the 217 vote threshold needed to take the gavel, Mr Jordan is now planning to hold a new vote at 10am ET on Friday.

The Ohio congressman initially announced he was putting a pause on his speakership bid on Thursday, backing a temporary solution to empower interim speaker Patrick McHenry until January in the hopes the Republican party can get its house in order.

But he then backtracked on this hours later, after GOP members rejected that option.

Prior to serving in Congress, Mr Jordan attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became a champion wrestler in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletics Association. Shortly thereafter, he received a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a law degree from Capital University Law School, though he never took the bar exam and never practised law, telling NPR in 2018, “I’m just a wannabe”.

He later served in both chambers of Ohio’s General Assembly before he won a seat in the US Congress in 2006. In the following years, he became one of the loudest voices in the Tea Party movement that served as a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency.

A product of the Tea Party wave and founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, Mr Jordan’s tenure in the House led to the ouster of former speaker John Boehner, which set the stage for Kevin McCarthy’s downfall earlier this month, despite his steadfast support for the speaker.

In addition, as a previous chair of the House Oversight Committee and now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he has defended Mr Trump vociferously. Fast-talking, pugnacious and prone to inflammatory rhetoric that veers into outright falsehoods, Mr Jordan often can be seen roaming the halls of the House not wearing a suit jacket.

But he also played a significant role in Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and spreading misinformation since then. He’s faced further scrutiny about whether he refused to report the sexual abuse of wrestlers he coached while at the Ohio State University.

Early in the morning of 6 October, former president Donald Trump threw his support behind Rep Jim Jordan in the race to become speaker of the House. The endorsement was not entirely surprising given Mr Jordan, an Ohio congressman, occupied the same lane in the House of Representatives that Mr Trump has as a presidential candidate and president – as an expression of conservatives who were dissatisfied with Republican leadership and a candidate who channelled their rage.

Following the failure of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to get the backing he needed for a vote on the floor of the House, the focus has now returned to Mr Jordan, who was the only challenger to Mr Scalise in the first internal GOP vote on who should be the next speaker. Mr Scalise won that vote 113 to Mr Jordan’s 99.

Mr Jordan backtracked on a pause on his speakership bid on Thursday (19 October), announcing in the afternoon that the members of the House GOP had rejected a temporary solution to empower interim speaker Patrick McHenry until January.

Rep Jim Jordan backtracked on a pause on his speakership bid on Thursday (19 October), announcing in the afternoon that the members of the House GOP had rejected a temporary solution to empower interim speaker Patrick McHenry until January.

“We made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get back to work. We decided that wasn’t where we’re gonna go. I’m still running for speaker and I plan to go the floor and get the votes and win this race,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner.

If Mr Jordan is unable to grasp the House speaker gavel, a number of Republicans have mentioned Louisiana Rep Mike Johnson as a possible next option.

The vice chair of the Republican conference, 51, has been floated alongside Majority Whip Tom Emmer, 62, who has spent the last half-decade in the leadership, with most of his time going to chairing the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

While Mr Emmer has some backers on the right of the party, large parts of the Trump wing aren’t as supportive, Punchbowl News noted.