Now we know where Jim Jordan stands

 

The Freedom Caucus can now re-brand as the RINO Caucus.  Politico reports:

Jim Jordan and other key conservative firebrands have caused a fair share of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s biggest headaches. But instead of leading the rebellion this time, they helped him quash it.

As the House Freedom Caucus was preparing to discuss whether to officially oppose the speaker’s bipartisan debt deal — a move that would potentially galvanize conservative opposition — Jordan (R-Ohio) phoned several fellow members with a request, according to a person familiar with the calls. The former chair of the group urged them to hold back, effectively giving conservatives who wanted to vote with McCarthy license to do so.

Jordan, a longtime McCarthy antagonist turned ally, almost got his wish. The group took no official position until hours before the vote, when most members had already made up their minds.

The beloved House Freedom Caucus co-founder — who gravitated toward McCarthy after the now-speaker tapped him for a senior spot on the Oversight Committee — helped out in other ways. The Ohio lawmaker spoke up in favor of the deal in private calls and meetings, including taking the mic at a closed-door huddle on Tuesday night, just hours after many of his fellow conservatives had spent the day trashing the deal.

This report concludes with this:

If most Republicans get on board, it means threats against his speakership won’t gain real traction. And with two-thirds of the GOP conference backing the deal Wednesday, it seemed to be working.

“We didn’t do it by taking the easy route,” McCarthy said in a celebratory post-vote press conference. “It wasn’t an easy fight, I had people on both sides upset.”

But he added: “I think we did pretty damn good for the American people.”

No debt ceiling.  No serious budget process.  J D Rucker considers this bill an existential threat.  His take is here.

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GOP vs GOPe : the Uniparty in plain sight

 

The curtain is pulled back.  Paula Bolyard is right about the GOP opposition to [R-establishment] Kevin McCarthy becoming Speaker of the House --- the floor fight visibly exposes the Uniparty’s concern for its own power and wealth – and it has nothing to do with the voters:

As of publishing time, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has lost five six votes in his bid to be House speaker and there seems to be no end in sight. There are around 20 Republican holdouts in the “never McCarthy” camp, and they’re showing no signs of budging.

. . .

Meanwhile, Republican establishment types are running around with their hair on fire, shouting about unity and warning that Republicans will pay a steep price unless they can show a united front in the early days of their House majority.

Hogwash.

One way or another, this will all be over in a few days and we’ll all go back to binge-watching mindless dramas on Netflix and planning our Super Bowl parties. A month from now, Rep. Jim Jordan will be holding hearings that won’t result in any Democrats paying a price for their treachery during Trump’s presidency, the House will once again be spending money like drunken sailors, and Congress will continue to get next to nothing useful done for the American people. Lather, rinse, repeat. Delaying the start of the congressional session by a few days, or even a month, won’t matter one iota. By the time the 2024 election rolls around, no one will care that there was a protracted fight for House speaker in early 2023.

. . .

What we’re witnessing now is the messy, glorious republican form of government our Founding Fathers laid out in the Constitution. Many Americans are tired of the Uniparty that exuberantly passes pork-laden omnibus spending bills in the dead of night and plays by Marquess of Queensberry Rules as our country plunges toward insolvency, immorality, and anarchy.

While establishment Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel would like to keep the party’s dirty laundry hidden, the American people deserve to know how the sausage is being made. We need to know what’s being promised to Republicans who vote for McCarthy. There are rumors that he may try to bring Democrats over to his side, and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is reportedly trying to cut a deal with him, which only increases distrust within the caucus.

And Ms Bolyard points out toward the end of the article:

But no matter what happens, the beauty is in the process. . . . enjoy the process, and thank God that you live in a country where we settle these things with words and not guns.

Read Ms. Bolyard’s PJ Media article here.

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Ohio AG opposes the Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board"

 

Dillon Burroughs at The Daily Wire reports

Virginia Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares sent a letter signed by 20 GOP attorneys general on Thursday to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening legal action against its ‘un-American’ Disinformation Governance Board.

. . .

“Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Instead of protecting and fostering it, this administration wants to create an organization that would have federal bureaucrats monitoring citizens’ speech. This would undoubtedly lead to Americans self-censoring their ideas and debates. I am concerned about the spread of false information, but creating a federal agency to police speech is not the way to address it. As the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I cannot stand by as the rights of every Virginian are being threatened. The war on the First Amendment must stop,” he wrote.

In addition to Virginia, the other states represented in the letter include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

The effort comes following another letter by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent to new Disinformation Governance Board leader Nina Jankowicz asking her to provide testimony regarding her new role.

The letter was signed by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a ranking member of the committee, along with 11 additional GOP House Judiciary Committee members. . . .

Good to see that Ohio is on the list.  Read the full report here.

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He’s not running

 

Photo credit: CNBC

The headline at Breitbart:

Rep. Jim Jordan Declines to Run for Senate in 2022

The referenced report at cleveland.com is behind a paywall. To read the report at Breitbart, click here.

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Meme of the day: cancel culture

 

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Woke vs. awoken

photo credit: foxnews

From guest blogger Pat:

Leo Terrell was woke but now he has awoken. He's not alone.

People are seeing the destruction wrought on major American cities by looters and rioters, led by Antifa shock troops armed with hammers, bear spray, blinding lasers, commercial fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and more while protected by shields, helmets, industrial quality gas masks and the ability to blend into a larger crowd of BLM protesters for protection. 

The MSM [mainstream media] support Antifa and BLM and hide from public view the violence committed by those radical groups. When Rep. Jim Jordan showed a video of the violence at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Congress, the MSM cut away. The head of the Committee, one Jerrold Nadler, flat out denied that the protests were anything but peaceful.

But, the MSM no longer has a monopoly on the news. Citizen journalists, bloggers, talk radio and even local TV channels are reporting on the destruction, which largely impacts poorer neighborhoods. The locals are figuring out that the white Antifa radicals that attacked their local supermarket, drugstore and police precinct are not fighting to improve their lives. Nor are the mobs that follow, under the umbrella of BLM, that loot and destroy these neighborhood foundations. 

BLM, Antifa and the MSM may be the woke darlings of today's Democrat party but they have awoken a silent coalition of all races and creeds that rejects divisive rhetoric and violence and wants a civil society restored. Despite the best efforts of the woke tech giants, it will be restored on November 4th, 2020.

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Alert: Amnesty Passes House Judiciary Committee

NumbersUSA sent out an Alert today: "Republican Buy-In Makes Amnesty Real Threat." Much of the message contained a pitch for contributions; I deleted those sections, although if you are interested, the NumbersUSA website is here. Here’s the Alert:

This morning, the House Judiciary Committee passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. That would mean the bill can now be voted on by the House with little additional warning. . . and with 23 Republican Co-sponsors, it's likely to pass.

I bet a lot of people might wonder why the Judiciary Committee is passing a farm workforce bill. It's because this bill is really an immigration bill.

We need to stop this bill.

Here's why they don't just call it an immigration bill: There are none of the good immigration reforms American voters are demanding, such as requiring E-Verify for every U.S. employer and eliminating chain migration. There's only more immigration and more amnesties.

• There's no reduction in immigration numbers.
• There's no end to the visa lottery.
• There's no reform of asylum or refugee laws.
• And there's no mandatory E-Verify for any but a tiny proportion of employers... who are going to get all the low-paid, indentured servants they can handle anyway.

Indentured servitude! -- THAT'S what this bill is about: using amnesty to provide indentured servants to the groups like the Western Growers Association. That's because it gives hundreds of thousands of workers -- and their families -- amnesty and green cards... after they work four to eight years as what amounts to indentured servants first.

Once the illegal farm workers get their amnesty, they would be free to take any job in America, not just farm jobs. On top of that, an additional 40,000 new green cards each year would be issued for unskilled workers to work in ANY job they can get in America.

Please don't write off this threat as merely coming from extremists in the House. It has overwhelming support from the Democratic caucus, and almost two dozen Republican House members are co-sponsoring. So, especially with the impeachment battle, it's hard to take anything for granted.

We're going to need hundreds of thousands of our members to contact Congress. For that to happen, we're going to need to activate our millions of activists, with millions upon millions of emails and social media messages. We've just finished a vital overhaul of our website, allowing much easier access to actions while maintaining security and discretion. 

Two Ohio Representatives are on the Judiciary Committee: Steve Chabot [https://chabot.house.gov/] and Jim Jordan [https://jordan.house.gov/]. Click here for the full House of Representatives roster and contact information.

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Heather MacDonald: False Testimony

Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and closing paragraphs:

The anti-police narrative depends on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the record.

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

. . .

The Republicans on the committee failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.” Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both statements could be true:  individual officers display heroism, and policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego but rather of the public battle of ideas.

The Democratic committee members and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training; mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured, misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring, which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and race-baiters.

Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs of Arizona. (E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)

# # #

Cleveland Tea Party Goes to Washington

Meeting Sen. Jim DeMint

Good news, bad news. . .

So there we were last Tuesday, sitting in the lobby of the Trump Old Post Office Hotel in DC, minding our own business, when who should walk by but Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows. I gave Rep. Jordan a thumbs-up, and they both stopped to shake hands with us and exchange pleasantries. Unfortunately, I missed the golden opportunity to ask Rep. Jordan a question that is probably on all our minds, and they carried on.

But then, who should I spy at the next table but former Senator Jim DeMint. So I went over and barged into his conversation. And I asked him point blank: will there be any indictments?  He responded that he had just had lunch with Reps. Jordan and Meadows and that they had discussed that very issue.  Sen. De Mint told me that they were guessing that some indictments would be coming down in 2 to 3 weeks, but that there would not be enough indictments. And he gave my husband a copy of his and Rachel Bovard’s new book, Conservative: Knowing What to Keep.  

# # #

More out-of-control spending

image credit: redstate.com

Yesterday, the House passed the bazillion dollar omnibus spending bill 256-167. Roll Call reports:

“Is the president going to sign the bill?” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said of the president and the omnibus spending bill. “Yes.”

Conservative Review reports:

On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the omnibus spending bill, clocking in at more than 2,000 pages, is “not even close” to what Republicans told the American people they would do if elected.

…

“It’s 2,200 pages that funds sanctuary cities, funds Planned Parenthood, restricts Second Amendment liberties, and grows the government at a $1.3 trillion price tag … which will lead to a trillion-dollar deficit,” Jordan said.

“This may be the worst bill I have seen in my time in Congress, the worst bill our leadership’s ever allowed to come to the floor,” he added.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) listed his objections (via Red State):

- Record spending levels

- No wall/border security

- Obamacare intact

- Funds Planned Parenthood

- Sanctuary Cities funded

- Barely 24 hours to read a 2,300 page bill

This Omnibus is so far from what the forgotten men and women of America voted for. I will oppose it.

Hard to know whether Jordan and Meadows are in earnest or are playing good cop. I'll update when I have located the roll call.

UPDATE 5:54pm: The roll call vote is here.

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UPDATE: Health Care Compact (HB 34)

Update

 Health Care Compact (HB 34) 

   

This Wednesday 9/30/2015 (tomorrow) coming back from their summer break, the Ohio House will be going back in session. 

While they still have a lot of business to address, it is important we continue our push for true health care freedom in Ohio with the Health Care Compact  (HB 34). 

At the federal level, the Health Care Compact (H.J. Res. 50) is picking up more conservative support with Ohio's own Congressman Jim Jordan signing on as a co-sponsor. 

Congressman Jordan was also pleased to hear & strongly supports Ohio's effort to become a member state of the Health Care Compact.

Please take a few minutes to contact your Ohio State Representative and respectfully request that they support the Health Care Compact (HB 34) and put Ohioans in charge of their own health care destiny.

Cuyahoga County Area GOP State Reps:

Rep Mike Dovilla

Phone: (614)466-4895

Contact: Click Here 

Rep. Nan Baker

Phone: (614)466-0961

Contact: Click Here 

Rep Marlene Anielski

Phone: (614)644-6041

Contact: Click Here 

Please call your OH House member and tell them to support the Health Care Compact - Click for OH House Directory.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership : House passes the bill

Art credit: Radix

UPDATE Thurs. From Breitbart Big Government:

Obamatrade is alive.

One week after the House of Representatives overwhelmingly rejected Obamatrade by voting against a key provision of it — Trade Adjustment Assistance — GOP establishment lawmakers resuscitated Trade Promotion Authority and rammed it through Thursday afternoon. The final tally was 218-208. . . .

. . . Because the Senate passed TAA and TPA together, the individual House version will now have to go back to the Senate for approval, where it may face a filibuster. It’s unclear how many senators would support TPA without TAA, a measure to aid workers who lose their jobs because of trade policy.

# # #

According to The Hill, the House will vote Thursday [tomorrow] on a stand-alone measure to grant President Obama fast-track trade authority.

Phyllis Schlafly explains how bad the bills are:

On Friday, Congress disrupted President Obama’s plan for a sweeping transfer of U.S. sovereignty to an unaccountable group of foreign busybodies. Hurray for the stalwart Americans who resisted the demands of Obama, the Republican leadership and the big-donor claque – but Speaker Boehner plans to give Congress another chance this week to make this dangerous mistake.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would turn over to globalists the power to issue regulations about U.S. trade, immigration, the environment, labor and commerce. It’s called a “living agreement,” which means the globalists can amend and change the text of the so-called agreement after it has gone into effect.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., has frankly warned about this giveaway of U.S. sovereignty. Not only would Congress give up its powers to negotiate and write the terms of a treaty, but Congress also gives up its power to debate and amend the deal, to apply a cloture vote in the Senate, and to require a two-thirds vote in the Senate.

. . .

TPP puts us in a new political and economic union before a single private citizen is told about it and with public opinion running five to one against it. Remember when Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass Obamacare in order to find out what is in it?

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., warns, “TPP calls for the formation of a permanent political and economic union known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission, which will have power to issue regulations impacting not only trade but immigration, the environment, labor and commerce.” He added, Congress “will have surrendered its legislative prerogatives. Before a word, line, paragraph, or page of this plan is made public, Congress will have even agreed to give up its treaty powers.”

. . .

Sessions continued: “Congress would be pre-clearing a political and economic union before a word of that arrangement has been made available to a single private citizen. This has the earmarks of a nascent European Union,” and Americans certainly don’t want to belong to a European union (that’s why we fought the American Revolution).

Rep. Hunter also warns that the new global governance institution would be “authorized to issue policies and regulations affecting our economy, our manufacturers, our workers, our immigration procedures, as well as current, labor and environmental practices.”

TPP is separating us from the U.S. Constitution and from national sovereignty and replacing both with a global governance superstructure. TPP has wrapped its audacious global governance plan in the mantle called “free trade,” which is a misnomer if there ever were one.

Read the rest here.

And here’s an update from today’s Politico:  

House Speaker John Boehner and Republican leaders are moving to revive President Barack Obama’s beleaguered trade agenda with an elaborate procedural workaround that was quickly greeted with skepticism among some Democrats.

Under the emerging plan, the House would vote on a bill that would give Obama fast-track authority to negotiate a sweeping trade deal with Pacific Rim countries, sending it to the Senate for final approval. To alleviate Democratic concerns, the Senate then would amend a separate bill on trade preferences to include Trade Adjustment Assistance, a worker aid program that Republicans oppose but that House Democrats have blocked to gain leverage in the negotiations over fast-track.

NationalReview Online reports:

When a group of House conservatives voted last week to kill a trade bill favored by President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders who support the measure steamed. Representative Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.) celebrated the revolt as a coming-of-age moment for rebel backbenchers. “Yesterday will be the day that we look back at as the day that conservatives finally started getting organized in the House,” he wrote in a note to the Spartanburg Tea Party. 

Led by Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a platoon of conservatives demanded that Boehner agree to a series of concessions in exchange for their support for so-called Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), legislation that would give President Obama wider latitude to negotiate free-trade agreements. When GOP leadership ignored them, Jordan and his allies tried to kill the bill on a procedural vote — a rare step made more surprising by the lawmakers’ general support for free trade. It was the boldest attempt yet from the recently formed House Freedom Caucus, which Jordan chairs, to counteract Boehner’s perceived tendency to wilt in the face of Democratic pressure.

Read more here. 

Find your Representative here.   The Congressional switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

Here are details for Ohio Senators:

Sen. Sherrod Brown

Phone: 202-224-2315

Fax: 202-228-6321

Sen.Rob Portman 

Phone: 202-224-3353

# # #

IRS beats tea party in court: Jim Jordan calls out the decision

From Politico:  IRS Beats Tea Party in Court

By RACHAEL BADE | 10/23/14 3:23 PM EDT Updated: 10/23/14 6:39 PM EDT

The IRS may have inadvertently figured out how to win its legal battles against aggrieved tea party groups: Give them what they wanted in the first place — tax-exempt status.

That was a major reason a Republican-appointed federal judge on Thursday threw out two lawsuits brought by more than 40 conservative groups seeking remedies for being singled out in the tea party targeting scandal, a victory for the IRS.

Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia dismissed almost all counts brought against the tax-collecting agency in two cases, ruling that both were essentially moot now that the IRS granted the groups their tax-exempt status that had been held up for years.

Walton, a President George W. Bush-appointee, also said individual IRS officials could not be fined in their individual capacity for allowing such treatment because it could hurt future tax enforcement.

The ruling, which the groups could appeal, has serious implications for tea party groups suing the IRS, suggesting they may never receive compensation for the long waits they endured for a ruling on their status.

The inspector general report that ignited the targeting controversy last year found that applications sat in limbo for as long as several years and that the groups were asked inappropriate questions about their donors, political affiliations and random things like social media posts.

Republicans said they were outraged at Walton’s decision.

 “You get targeted and harassed for three years but, oh, because you finally get [tax-exempt status], the three years of harassment doesn’t mean anything?” asked Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who heads a congressional subpanel investigating the controversy. “I find that argument lacking tremendously in light of what these people went through.”

But others said the agency needs to do more — not less — to scrutinize nonprofit groups that don’t follow the rules and over-engage in political activities. To obtain the status in question, political activity must not be the groups’ primary activity — a vague and difficult-to-administer test.

“Judge Walton got it right — there is no ongoing injury to these groups,” said Paul S. Ryan [not the Rep.], senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which backs tighter rules on political nonprofits. “The IRS needs to enforce tax law with respect to nonprofit political groups more aggressively.”

A furor erupted in May 2013, after a Treasury inspector general report blasted the IRS for using discriminatory labels to sort through applicants seeking tax-exempt status using terms like “tea party ” and “patriots."

Soon after a raft of right-leaning organizations that applied for tax-exempt status sued the government. Some had had their applications put on hold for years; others were asked what were later ruled inappropriate questions about donors and political views during the application process.

The groups in their suits alleged that the IRS violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights with the inappropriate “be on the lookout” list that used words like tea party to hold up their applications. They sought monetary relief for their trouble as well as injunctive relief barring the IRS from discriminating against conservative groups ever again.

The agency has since changed its practices, including scrapping the lists.

When the suits at hand were filed, 22 of the groups had already received their tax-exempt status, five had dropped their applications altogether and just over a dozen were still waiting to hear from the IRS.

Since then, the IRS had approved all but two, rendering much of the arguments moot, the judge said — and preventing him from considering the case.

“After the plaintiff initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff,” Walton said in his decision to throw out True the Vote’s lawsuit against the IRS.

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