Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

The ascension of Jim Jordan from congressional reprobate, loon, extremist and clown to potential speaker of the United States House of Representatives isn’t just a searing indictment against the basic moral fitness of the Republican Party, but also an incandescent marker of national decay.

The other day I made a spectacular error in judgement. I looked past the events of the last seven years and evaluated House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul as a serious person. For an instant, I saw a person who wanted to move beyond the Trump insanity and recognized the growing global crisis at hand. Certainly he is smart, informed and grasps exactly what is happening all around him. Of this, there can be no doubt whatsoever.

Yet, I could not see the spectacular cynicism and rottenness of his character. According to Puck News’ Abby Livingston, despite McCaul being a holdout last week, yesterday, he “fell in line,” and will support Jordan because he (and Mike Rogers) are “chairmen, respectively of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committee.” It is obvious that my exhaustion weakened my capacity for disbelief around the obvious rottenness of the entire enterprise.

Let me clear. No person who loves their country and takes its security seriously could ever even remotely consider voting for Jim Jordan, a preposterous figure whose rise portends a national catastrophe every bit as much as Trump’s did. Wow. Simply, wow.

Amazingly, once again, the soulless, transactional and cowardly have formed an alliance of idiocy that threatens the foundations of the country for what exactly? How is it that the most unfit people keep rising to the top of the MAGA/GOP mess and threatening the peace, prosperity and futures of 332 million Americans? What are we going to do about it?

Are there really not four Republicans who will hold the line against making Jim Jordan second in line to the presidency? How can that be? Is it really possible that there is a crisis of cowardice, corruption and lassitude that deep? Breathtaking doesn’t begin to describe it. Let’s put it this way: without any question there has never been a vote by any majority in any Congress ever for any person who even remotely approaches Jordan’s manifest and obvious unfitness for any position of public trust.

This is a historic moment in that it marks a type of belligerent declaration by the majority party in the House towards the country. It is a giant, transgressive and assertive “f@#k you” against decency, common sense and democracy. It is a harbinger of disaster and chaos.

Should Jim Jordan become speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States, America will pay the price. More precisely, the American people will—and I fear the cost will be ghastly.

Truly.

If Jim Jordan makes it to the speaker’s office it should be recognized that it means this country is in big trouble. We are in danger. Don’t look away from that. It must be faced before it grows much worse.

Why Jim Jordan is unfit to be speaker of the House

I break down the complete and total dysfunction among the Republican members of the House of Representatives and how their inability to govern will only increase if they move forward with plans to make Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio the next speaker of the House. I explain how Jordan’s complicity in trying to overturn the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump and his petulant style of governing make him completely unfit to be second in the line of presidential succession. I then talk about how FOX News’ biggest names, like Sean Hannity, have become the Republican Conference themselves, even going as far as to pressure GOP holdouts to vote for Jordan.