WASHINGTON — Republicans’ choice for their next House speaker played an active role in trying to overturn Pennsylvania's 2020 presidential election based on disproven claims of voter fraud.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out votes that gave Joe Biden a victory in a state Donald Trump had carried four years earlier, accused Pennsylvania Democrats of trying to steal the election, voted to reject the state’s certified electoral votes hours after the Capitol was overrun by pro-Trump insurrectionists, and spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg shortly after Election Day.
“In my view, Jim Jordan is tainted,” said Ross Baker, a congressional expert and political science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “He carries the taint of being a collaborator with Donald Trump in trying to overturn an honest election and has never backed off from that. He has tenaciously held onto that false belief. This guy is Trump through and through. He is an advocate and somebody who pushed aggressively for the election fraud myth.”
It remains to be seen if Mr. Jordan, who Republicans nominated last week, can secure the 217 votes he needs to win the post in a roll call vote scheduled for Tuesday. With Republicans holding a razor-thin House majority and Democrats sure to unanimously oppose him, he can lose only five GOP lawmakers.
“Most Americans understand that Joe Biden won the election fair and square,” said former Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Jim Greenwood. He said election denial contributed to “a tremendous amount of discord among the American public, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. If Republicans want to hold onto the majority, they will have to appeal to most Americans. If they want to keep the majority, it will be difficult to put election deniers in very public positions.”
Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, who used to represent the Lehigh Valley — a perennial swing area —- said electing Mr. Jordan is going to be problematic for Republicans in competitive districts next year, especially those won by Mr. Biden in 2020.
“It’s one thing voting against certifying the electoral votes,” Mr. Dent said. “It’’s quite another to take a position that Jim Jordan did, enthusiastically advocating Trump’s stolen election narrative. That would be very problematic. I think Democrats will try to drape both Jordan and Trump around the necks of Republicans whenever they can. There’s a lot of tape out there on Jim Jordan.”
Mr. Jordan’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Pennsylvania ran afoul of the top elected Republican official in the state at the time, then-U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey. Mr. Toomey, who did not seek re-election in 2022, rejected false claims of a stolen election and said he had an easy answer as to how Mr. Biden won back a state that Mr. Trump carried in 2016.
“His narrow victory in Pennsylvania is easily explained by the decline in suburban support for President Trump and the president’s slightly smaller victory margins in most rural counties,” Mr. Toomey said in January 2021.
Mr. Jordan, founder of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and chair of the Judiciary Committee, did not respond to requests for comment.
All three of Western Pennsylvania’s Republican House members sided with a majority of their colleagues in trying to overturn the 2020 election and return Mr. Trump to the White House. They all signed the Supreme Court brief and voted to reject Pennsylvania’s certified electoral votes.
Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, said he would vote for Mr. Jordan on Tuesday.
“Jim Jordan knows my southwestern PA district as well as anyone thanks to his time recruiting from our top local wrestling programs,” Mr. Reschenthaler tweeted. “This will serve our region well. Jim has long championed our conservative agenda and now he’s ready to lead as Speaker of the House. I look forward to voting for him on the House floor.”
So does Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Centre, according to his spokeswoman, Maddison Stone.
“A number of constituents have reached out to weigh in on who they support for speaker and more than two thirds are in favor of Rep. Jordan,” she said. “Having won the majority of the GOP conference, he is the obvious choice and Rep. Thompson will be lending his support.”
But Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, said he would not support Mr. Jordan. He initially supported House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana for speaker. Mr. Scalise defeated Mr. Jordan in the Republican conference last week, but backers of the defeated candidate said they would not support the winner, preventing him from getting the votes he needed.
“Integrity is the most important thing that all of us have,” Mr. Kelly told reporters Monday. “There's nothing more important than that. When I see what's going on in that conference, and understand that we had an election, and we elected somebody, and because people in that conference didn't agree with the election, 'No, no, no, we've got to stop it all now, and we've got to have another election.' The real man in the room is Steve Scalise.”
Mr. Jordan also is running with the endorsement of the former president. “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media platform.
Mr. Jordan was one of the Republicans who actively fought to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania and elsewhere using false fraud claims. They did so even as the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council — comprised of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the National Association of State Election Directors — called the election “the most secure in American history.”
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., recently called Mr. Jordan an “insurrectionist.”
Mr. Jordan’s activities drew the interest of the bipartisan House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack by supporters of Mr. Trump.
“Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6th than any other member of the House of Representatives,” the committee’s vice chair, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in a speech at the University of Minnesota earlier this month. “Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.”
Mr. Jordan refused to testify after being subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee. He later threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for not responding to a subpoena from his Judiciary Committee this year.
The acting deputy U.S. attorney general at the time of the Capitol riot, Richard Donoghue, told the House Jan. 6 panel that Mr. Trump talked to him about how Mr. Jordan was trying to uncover voter fraud in Pennsylvania and that the Justice Department should be working on it, too.
“[Mr. Trump] made a passing reference to Jim Jordan,” Mr. Donoghue said. “He said, ‘That guy's a fighter.’ He was saying how several people out there, Jim Jordan and others, were trying to find out what happened with regard to these various fraud allegations and that they were doing what they could but that their authority was limited, and so, you know, this is something the department should be aware of, these are things the department should be looking at.”
Mr. Jordan objected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to let elections officials count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day but received up to three days later, accusing Democrats of “trying to steal the election after the election.”
While 10,000 ballots arrived after Election Day, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes.
“The evidence is overwhelming that Joe Biden won this election,” Mr. Toomey said in November 2020.
That didn’t stop Mr. Jordan from urging the House Judiciary and Oversight committees to investigate the 2020 election “amid troubling reports of irregularities and improprieties” in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
He also joined Mr. Trump in wrongly claiming that Pennsylvania Democrats barred Republican observers from watching poll workers count ballots. The dispute actually was over how close the poll watchers could get to the tables where the ballots were being tallied, not whether they could witness the count.
CBS News, The New York Times, and PolitiFact all said the claim that observers were excluded was false, and even Mr. Trump’s lawyers acknowledged in court that there were “a nonzero number of people in the room” while unsuccessfully seeking an emergency order to stop the count.
In addition, Mr. Jordan attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg two days after the 2020 election. Former Virginia GOP field director and conservative activist Scott Presler organized the rally.
“Democrats and Vice President Biden are saying ‘count every vote,’ but Scott said it right:’ count every legitimate vote,’” Mr. Jordan said to boisterous cheers outside the state Capitol.
“We’re going to thank people for coming out and supporting the president,” he later said to more cheers. “Let’s be honest: The reason the swamp has been so out to get the president is because he’s fighting for us so hard.”
J.J. Abbott, a longtime Democratic strategist in Harrisburg, said Mr. Jordan’s efforts in the Keystone State should disqualify him to be House speaker.
“Jim Jordan traveled to Pennsylvania, a state he does not represent, in November 2020 to push PA Republicans to overturn the election for Donald Trump,” Mr. Abbott tweeted. “He shouldn’t even be in Congress, let alone third in the line of succession.”
Jonathan D. Salant: jsalant@post-gazette.com, @JDSalant; Benjamin Kail: bkail@post-gazette.com, @BenKail
First Published: October 16, 2023, 6:15 p.m.
Updated: October 17, 2023, 1:25 p.m.