AMHERST, Ohio — Jim Jordan was steamed.

For months, top House Republicans had blown off the House Freedom Caucus’ demands to launch impeachment proceedings against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, seeing it as wrong on the merits and a political loser. But conservatives believe he’d lied to Congress. So Jordan — the ringleader of the 40-something rebels who’ve upended the House Republican Conference and drove John Boehner into early retirement — decided it was time for a more confrontational approach. other

Early this month he cornered Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte on the House floor and presented him with a choice: Haul Koskinen in for questioning under oath, or the Freedom Caucus would force a vote on the sensitive impeachment matter just a few weeks before Election Day.

Within days, Jordan got his hearing.

In the 18-plus months since he helped launch the Freedom Caucus (HFC), Jordan has emerged as arguably the second-most influential Republican in the House after Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The 52-year-old ex-wrestling champion from Ohio has routinely thwarted his own Republican leadership’s priorities in a drive to push his party’s agenda rightward, rallying his troops to sink Ryan-led legislative initiatives they feel are way too accommodating to the left.

His power, though, seems to have reached a tipping point. An increasing number of Jordan’s Republican House colleagues are fed up with his tactics. In the case of the impeachment hearing, it gave him and his allies another cathartic moment to rake Koskinen over the coals, but the exercise mostly just angered other Republicans. And the odds of Koskinen ultimately losing his job are next to nil.

“You have the tail wagging the dog, a small group of 40 people basically dictating to leadership: This is what we will or will not allow you to do,” said one senior Republican allied with House GOP leadership. “It’s an inversion of political influence.”

Jordan stands by the group’s damn-the-torpedoes approach, on impeachment and plenty of other matters (and there have been plenty). He says Republicans have a disturbing habit of caving to Democrats, and a different approach is needed to start securing some GOP victories, especially on fiscal policy.

“We have to win on something,” he said during an interview in his central Ohio district, frustration bubbling in his voice. “It’s like a football team that’s 0 and 9. The last week of the season, you’re not playing for the state playoffs; you’re playing to win the game and set the tone for the future. My attitude is: Let’s win on one issue to set a different tone and create a different dynamic… We have to win on something!”

One Hill staffer described Jordan as “a bulldog in Boy Scouts clothing,” and it’s safe to say his taste for combat started young. His father, a GM factory worker, started a wrestling program at his elementary school in rural Urbana, Ohio, and Jordan was soon hooked.

By the time he graduated high school, he was a four-time state wrestling champion. And he went on to win a Division I championship at the University of Wisconsin, defeat future four-time world champion John Smith and coach Ohio State’s wrestling team for eight years.

Eventually he wanted a career change, and when a state lawmaker from his area retired, Jordan decided to give it a shot.

“A good, hard campaign is about as close to wrestling as you can get, so I liked the idea,” he said.

Local Republican party officials scoffed. A two-term county commissioner running for the seat will “clean your clock,” he said they told him. In the end, Jordan said, “we ran circles around the guy.”

The pattern repeated itself a few years later when Jordan ran for state Senate. He went up against a fellow state GOP representative with big-name endorsements, from the governor of Ohio to a rising-star congressman named John Boehner.

Jordan ran to the right on issues like welfare and tax cuts, and again out-hustled the guy, knocking on some 6,000 doors, he said. His extended family would congregate weekly to personally address campaign fliers so people would be more likely to open them.

Jordan’s victory foreshadowed his future clashes with Republican leaders and subconsciously instilled a lesson in him: You can take on the establishment and win.

“If you set goals and work hard, good things happen,” he said, reflecting on his early career. “Politics are no different than sports or anything else.”

Jordan won his House seat in 2006, the year that Democrats took the majority, but he didn’t emerge as a force until five years later. Republicans reclaimed the House and elected him to lead the Republican Study Committee, a powerful faction within the GOP conference focused on crafting policy. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) remembers turning to Ryan at the time and asking who he should vote for. “Jim Jordan, of course!” Ryan responded, according to Gowdy.

Jordan that year also befriended a bunch of firebrand freshman who rode the 2010 tea party wave to Washington but didn’t quite fit in with their establishment colleagues. They admired Jordan for his conservative purity and they quickly formed an alliance.

Within six months atop the study committee, Jordan began to divide the Republican Conference. He and his new allies pushed Boehner to hold out for more spending cuts from Democrats before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling— even if it meant flirting with default — a ploy broadly viewed as a kamikaze mission. But Jordan felt Republicans could win, pointing to the anti-government spending sentiment pulsing through the country that year.

Boehner ignored Jordan and cut a deal with Democrats. But the episode established Jordan as a rising champion of the far-right. And Boehner’s allies sensed a threat. The late Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette encouraged Boehner at the time to draw Jordan out of his seat through redistricting. Boehner declined, a decision that may have ultimately cost him his job.

The Freedom Caucus was born in 2015 after Jordan’s close friend, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), lost his bid for Republican Study Committee chairman, an election some conservatives believed was rigged by leadership. Conservatives banded together in a bid to force leadership to pay attention to them. And who better to lead the charge than someone who’d shown he had no compunction about taking on Republican brass.

Boehner was immediately in their bulls’ eye. Within about nine months, the Freedom Caucus pulled off the unthinkable: Driving the most powerful Republican in the country to resign mid-term.

“John Boehner had a tough job — one of the toughest jobs a person could have,” said Jordan, who never criticized Boehner publicly and even begged HFC Rep. Mark Meadows not to force Boehner out mid-session. “He had to deal with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and people like me, so that is not easy. “

Jordan and his followers haven’t given Ryan much breathing room. Among other things, they blocked him from passing a budget, the speaker’s top priority this year, because it didn’t cut spending enough; and tanked leadership’s response to the Orlando massacre because it wasn’t hawkish enough on terrorism.

“Leadership is definitely a little afraid of him,” said another senior Republican who asked not to be named.

Shortly after Ryan took over, Jordan said he encouraged him to “demonstrate that there is a new team in town now” by linking a bill halting Obama’s Syrian refugee program to must-pass government funding. Polls showed Americans were worried following an Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in California, and Jordan believed Republicans could leverage that advantage.

It was the kind of go-for-broke Freedom Caucus tactic that failed many times before. The difference between Jordan and the bulk of the GOP conference is that he actually believes Republicans can win such a fight and that Democrats will blink if Republicans hold firm.

Ryan declined Jordan’s advice, however, and Jordan is still a little sour about it: “Why do we think it’s going to be different now if we’re not willing to pick one issue and stand firm for that one issue and win? Right now, [Demcorats] think they can win on these negotiations every time!”

Jordan doesn’t look imposing. He’s short but fit – keeping himself in shape with a maniacal routine of push-ups and wide-rimmed pull-ups – and despite his tough-guy reputation, bears some Midwestern humility. He married his grade-school sweetheart, raised four kids in a small farmhouse and ranks among the lowest-net worth members of Congress. He refuses to trash talk other Republicans, on or off the record. Even those who don’t like him say he’s good for his word.

But in the trenches of debate, he’s a fearsome competitor. When he’s interrogating an opposing witness at a hearing, he’s got a quick retort for everything, and gets so hot and animated that his Oversight colleagues say he’s easily the scariest questioner on the dais.

“He comes straight at you and he expects you to come straight at him,” said Gowdy, a friend of Jordan’s. “He doesn’t have time for games or finesse.”

His constituents love him for it. At a town hall in Amherst, Ohio, this month, one woman told him “we don’t want you to back down on [your investigations] in any way, shape or form.” Another applauded him for being what she called an authentic conservative in the House full of phonies. “Bless you, sir!” she said.

Other Republicans more prone to play ball with GOP leadership say their main beef with Jordan is over tactics, not ideology.

“I like Jim personally, and I respect that he is dedicated and passionate about the things he cares about, but in order to accomplish things, everybody needs to work as a team,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), a former federal prosecutor who tried to talk Jordan off the IRS impeachment warpath. “If you take the ball and say ‘my way or the highway,’ nothing gets done.”

Retiring Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), who resigned from the Freedom Caucus last year, said that while Jordan “does what he does out of a deep sense of conviction,” he should “spend more time persuading the conference to their view as opposed to making everybody capitulate.”

Jordan’s combativeness has even caused him to clash with conservative friends. He and Gowdy were often at odds during the Benghazi Committee investigation, several sources said. Gowdy was determined to show his probe wasn’t about Hillary Clinton; Jordan encouraged him to go for the jugular. The week the report was released, the two were seen engaged in a heated exchange on the House floor. Jordan ultimately released his own report accusing the administration of a political cover-up, because Gowdy wouldn’t.

While Jordan says blocking bad legislation counts as a big success for the Freedom Caucus, he acknowledges that his group has made little headway passing its own legislation. “It’s tough to win the policy debate when you’re a 40-member body,” he said.

Jordan acknowledges that his has made little headway on legislation, and “it’s tough to win the policy debate when you’re a 40-member body.”

But instead of ditching his no-holds-barred approach, he’s trying to build a conservative army inside Congress to further boost his clout. Over the summer, he recruited Republican candidates who he thought might join the group if they win, and next year caucus members may comprise a larger percentage of a smaller Republican Conference, giving Jordan and the Freedom Caucus more leverage.

As for the pleas to play more constructively with leadership?

“I’m going to try to get thing accomplished for my constituents in the best way I can, and I’m going to be aggressive about it,” Jordan said. “I’m not going to change what I do or how I try to do it.”

---

Comments are closed.