House Republicans have chosen Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as their leader when they become the minority pitted against a massive Democratic majority in the next Congress. By a vote of 106-73 Tuesday, they picked the chairman of the judiciary committee over current Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).
Scalise is the more polished and accomplished legislator, but the GOP conference showed it wanted a leader whose principal quality is pugnaciousness. Clearly it weighed heavily with Jordan’s colleagues that leadership will be a very different job come January 2027 than it is today. We might have preferred Scalise, but it must be acknowledged that Jordan has qualities that could make him the right man for a tough job next year.
Scalise may be the more polished and accomplished legislator, but Jordan brings a proven pugnacious attitude to a caucus that will fill a very different role come January 2027. For all his faults, Jordan does appear to be the right man for a tough job next year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who declined to run for a leadership position in the next Congress and has joked about leaving office early to start a lawn business, served his party well while in power. He inherited a chaotic caucus that had just ousted one speaker and spent three weeks trying to elect another in October of 2023. Within six months, he had broken a deadlock over aid to Israel and Ukraine by deftly separating them into two different bills.
Johnson’s wins got bigger once President Donald Trump returned to the White House. In January 2025, he helped pass the Laken Riley Act, which expanded mandatory detention for certain illegal immigrants charged with crimes such as theft. In July, he helped secure the votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which made key provisions of the 2017 tax cuts permanent and provided new money for border security. That December, he ushered through a defense bill that overhauled how the Pentagon buys weapons and authorized more spending on missiles and munitions. And in June 2026, he got a second reconciliation bill through the House by two votes, securing nearly $70 billion for immigration, border enforcement, and other Department of Homeland Security operations.
None of these victories came easily — nothing with House Republicans does — and Johnson leaned heavily on the power of the White House at key moments. But he and Scalise should still be credited with deftly navigating the competing demands of their own members, managing many outsize personalities in their caucus, and holding together a majority that could afford precious few defections. Their patience and persistence produced a legislative record that would have been impressive with a much larger majority.
Jordan, meanwhile, has made a name for himself investigating Democratic Party malfeasance. In 2020, he pressed then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci to explain why warnings against large gatherings seemed to exempt Black Lives Matter protests, exposing a double standard while Republicans were in the minority.
Then in 2023, Jordan’s threat to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt helped secure documents showing White House pressure on Facebook to suppress COVID-related content, including accurate information. His subsequent “Facebook Files” kept government censorship in the news for months.
When Fauci returned to Capitol Hill in 2024, Jordan used communications about that pressure to challenge his account of the lab-leak debate and renew scrutiny of efforts to suppress discussion.
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In March 2026, Jordan confronted Gov. Tim Walz over Minnesota’s resumption of payments to Feeding Our Future, challenging his claim that a court had required the payments and demanding accountability for the continuing flow of taxpayer money.
As minority leader, Jordan is not going to craft and execute a comprehensive legislative agenda for Republicans to run on in 2028. That is not his job. It will be up to those running for president to create and sell voters a vision for the country’s future. Jordan’s job will be to keep House Republicans united, challenge the Democrats’ agenda, and, when he can, expose the majority party’s incompetence and corruption. His record shows he knows how to pick a fight and make it count.