Congress

Meet the Republican who wants to be the next Jim Jordan

Published

1 year ago

March 31, 2025

Rep. Brandon Gill, the youngest Republican in the House, has a role model he’s trying to emulate — and it’s not Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.

It’s former champion wrestler, proto-MAGA stalwart and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan who the 31-year-old Texan is seeking to follow. Gill is consciously replicating the formula that made Jordan a household name among conservatives — landing seats on the combative Ohio Republican’s committees, Judiciary and Oversight, and quickly earning a similar reputation for bare-knuckle partisan brawling.

“I’d like to be as close to Jim Jordan as possible,” Gill said in a recent interview. “I’d love to sit in there and just watch him do his committee hearings and learn from him, and get his advice on things.”

Gill, in fact, might have learned from Jordan all too well: His latest crusade — pushing for impeachment of a federal judge who sought to block President Donald Trump’s deportation plans — has put him at odds with Jordan, who is allied with House GOP leaders in counseling a less aggressive approach to confronting the federal judiciary.

In essence, Gill is playing the role Jordan used to occupy earlier in his career — the rabble-rouser pushing party leaders to do more, political headaches be damned. And his explanations ring pretty familiar for anyone familiar with Jordan’s “follow-the-voters” rhetoric.

“Not everybody is where I am” on judicial impeachments, Gill said. “I’d like to push us in that direction because I think that’s what the American people want. Very, very clearly, that’s what Republican voters want.”

Gill, who has gathered the backing of more than 20 colleagues in his effort to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, said he’s dead-set on promoting a more “muscular conservatism,” much in the same way Jordan has urged Republicans to fight harder over his nearly two-decade congressional career.

Jordan, meanwhile, is now helping fellow Republican leaders keep GOP hard-liners at bay, floating judicial overhaul legislation as a less risky proposition than impeaching judges.

The impeachment campaign has failed to pick up steam among old-guard conservatives who see it as an ill-fated distraction — despite Trump publicly voicing support for using Congress to wipe the bench of judges he perceives as hostile.

“The likelihood that you’re going to impeach people for maladministration, as it’s called, is just low,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a former Oversight chair whose bill addressing national injunctions is poised to come for a vote on the House floor Wednesday. “And even if you did, should we be second-guessing the decisions of the [judiciary]? The answer is no.”

There’s no small irony in Jordan now occupying the role of elder statesman urging his younger colleagues to exercise prudence. The 61-year-old came to prominence on Capitol Hill as a thorn in the side of former Speaker John Boehner, who stepped down in the wake of pressure from hard-liners like Jordan, whom he called a “legislative terrorist.” Years later, Jordan sought the speaker’s gavel himself, losing after more moderate colleagues held out and denied him the nod in an internal GOP vote.

Gill said he doesn’t fault Jordan for pursuing a more restrained approach now in regard to judges, and he has so far refrained from trying to force a vote on his impeachment resolution on the House floor. “We’re all on the same team here,” he said.

Jordan, in an interview, praised Gill as “a sharp young man” with a strong work ethic and said Gill didn’t need his advice.

To be sure, Jordan remains a darling of the MAGA right. A co-founder and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, he’s a frequent guest on conservative media, has Trump’s ear and controls a panel with jurisdiction over marquee issues like law enforcement, immigration and gun rights.

Now Gill is looking to fashion himself as someone who embodies Jordan’s rabble-rousing past with his current establishment clout. In addition to assignments on Judiciary and Oversight, Gill is also a member of the new Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — a complementary effort to the Department of Government Efficiency initiative headed up by Elon Musk, with whom Jordan has a longstanding relationship.

Gill has even deeper ties to hard-right conservatism. A former Wall Street investment banker, he married the daughter of conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza in 2017. He has since ridden a far-right wave among young men into a conservative media career and then into Congress, where he says he continues to be motivated by growing up in a world where young conservatives like himself “were belittled and insulted for being a white male constantly.”

Much like his father-in-law — the activist behind a film promoting discredited conspiracies about election fraud that’s widely popular with the far right — Gill has sought online viral fame by embracing the offensive and outrageous. In one recent case, he suggested Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, should be deported to Somalia for advising people on how to engage with immigration enforcement.

“Brandon Gill’s claim to fame is peddling race-baiting conspiracy theories and pushing the big lie with the 2020 election to gain clout within the Republican Party,” Omar said in a statement. “He is nothing more than a xenophobic fame-chaser, nepo-baby that never had to work for anything in his life.”

Gill is used to making enemies. He described being radicalized toward conservatism while attending Dartmouth College, where his wife was allegedly excommunicated from her sorority house after the 2016 election for what she claims was her support for Trump.

“I’ve always been conservative, but the more you’re around rabid leftists, that’s what red-pills you,” Gill said.

Gill recalled that one of his first memories of meeting Jordan was on the set of his father-in-law’s movie “Police State,” a 2023 film alleging that the federal government weaponized its law enforcement. Jordan later campaigned for Gill in what at one point was an 11-person Congressional primary, arguing that the Texas Republican was needed in Washington to “protect conservative values from Washington elites.” Trump endorsed Gill in that primary, too.

Gill spoke effusively about Jordan in a recent interview, calling him “the best of the best” among House Republicans in terms of his performances at hearings and in the media. After the Oversight hearing last week with leaders of PBS and NPR, where Republicans threatened to withhold the media networks’ future government funding, Gill said he texted Jordan to pick his brain on how he prepared for the proceedings.

Gill and the other Republicans on the DOGE subcommittee later wrote to Johnson to demand that lawmakers defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the public entity that in turn funds NPR and PBS.

On public media, Gill is hardly out of step with top GOP leaders, who have also voiced support for zeroing out congressional support for the networks. But when it comes to picking fights with an anti-Trump judge — and in the eyes of his critics, potentially provoking a constitutional crisis — he said he’s more than willing to push boundaries.

“All of this boils down to a basic question of, are we going to allow the Republic to survive or not?” said Gill of his political motivations. “And if it’s going to survive, we’ve got to start being a lot more aggressive with how we play politics. The left plays to win. They play for keeps.”

Congress

Turek leads Hinson in Iowa Senate poll of likely general election voters

Published

3 minutes ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iowa Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek has a narrow lead over GOP rival Ashley Hinson in a new internal poll of likely general-election voters.

Turek leads Hinson 47 percent to 45 percent in the poll, conducted by Global Strategy Group from June 8-11 among 1,000 likely general election voters. The poll shows that Republicans have a 10-point edge in voter registration (42 percent to 32 percent) and an electorate that voted for Trump by 9 points (50 percent for Trump to 41 percent for Kamala Harris).

But the polling also shows President Donald Trump’s favorabilities underwater across the electorate, with 45 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable. Among registered independents, Trump is upside down 28 points.

Turek is “significantly outperforming the state’s underlying partisan dynamics,” Global Strategy Group’s Matt Canter & Ramzi Ebbini write in a memo first obtained by Blue Light News. “Republicans maintain substantial advantages in voter registration and party identification, yet Turek enters the general election ahead of Republican Ashley Hinson, with stronger personal favorability ratings, overperforming a generic Democrat, and with clear opportunities to expand his coalition as more voters become familiar with him.”

Some Republicans have acknowledged a concern about Iowa.

“There are some issues there that we got to deal with — the biggest one is trade — trade and tariffs,” said a Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the obstacles.

In his early general election messaging, Turek has leaned into farmers’ frustrations.

“Josh Turek is winning this race because Iowans are sick and tired of multi-millionaire politicians like Ashley Hinson who sell out working families while they get rich,” Turek for Iowa campaign manager Brendan Koch said in a statement first shared with Blue Light News. “We will spend the next 134 days connecting with Iowans in every corner of the state and across the political spectrum to send a fighter for the working class to the U.S. Senate.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP races to make Recon 3.0 real

Published

48 minutes ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans have eight days to prove Reconciliation 3.0 might actually happen.

The House returns Tuesday with only eight legislative days before they break again for the July 4 holiday. If members want a realistic chance at fulfilling their self-imposed timeline for advancing the legislation before the end of July — when they pause work again for another five weeks — they need to move fast.

That means assembling, and then adopting, a budget resolution — the first step in unlocking the filibuster skirting power of the reconciliation process. It took Republicans months to advance such a blueprint during their two earlier reconciliation efforts this Congress.

House GOP leaders are tentatively planning another senior-level reconciliation meeting for Wednesday, according to three people involved in the talks granted anonymity to discuss private plans.

Still, the House is coming back with several other moving items to deal with this week, including promised briefings on the president’s Iran deal and a major housing affordability package GOP leadership wants to clear as soon as Wednesday.

Reconciliation talks also come as President Donald Trump is expected to join the Senate’s GOP lunch Wednesday, where he’ll likely continue pushing the chamber to pass his SAVE America Act or attach pieces of the GOP elections bill to the party-line legislation (an idea one of the bill’s biggest backers, Sen. Mike Lee, spiked Sunday).

Republicans involved with Reconciliation 3.0 discussions also warn they need to reach a final agreement on how to pay for the bill as well as what policy items will be included before GOP leaders can try to advance any budget resolution.

At this point, however, many fiscal hawks and at-risk incumbents are largely unhappy about how the discussions are coming along.

“It’s fake pay-fors for defense spending no one has fully agreed to and no meaningful reforms,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to discuss private talks.

Back on the other side of the Capitol, GOP senators have been in no rush to start working on a third party-line bill, especially as they are consumed with other political fires — like trying to confirm Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence to speed up a FISA reauthorization (more on that below).

Rep. Morgan Griffith said he was confident if the right policies are included in the House plan the Senate would then take it up — although he, too, acknowledged the challenges of a short timeline.

“If we do it right, yeah,” Griffith said. “There’s some interesting things out there that are being discussed that could make it a real possibility.”

What else we’re watching:

— OBAMA’S FEROCIOUS IRAN CRITIC SOFTER ON TRUMP DEAL: Tom Cotton, the No. 3 Senate Republican and chair of the chamber’s Intelligence panel, is not alone among GOP defense hawks in finding himself in an awkward position trying to defend Trump’s Iran deal after lambasting President Barack Obama’s a decade before. But the combination of his prior ferocity toward the Iranian regime and his current leadership responsibilities have put him into an especially tight spot.

— FIRST IN IC: DEMS WANT MORE OF JACK SMITH’S REPORT: Senate Judiciary Democrats are asking a federal court to unseal part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term. The request from the Senators comes as the Judiciary Committee is poised to call Smith to testify about his Biden-era cases before the end of this Congress. Republicans in the House and Senate have been investigating Smith’s work, alleging it amounted to a weaponization of the federal government against the then ex-president.

Jordain Carney and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

A rising populist tide is threatening New York’s powerful incumbents

Published

3 hours ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — Incumbents beware: The public is angry.

As voters across the country express frustration with the political establishment, congressional hopefuls are seeing a prime opportunity to tap into a movement with the potential to manifest a handful of upsets in New York’s primary elections.

The dynamic is playing out in intraparty electoral brawls across the state, where the outcomes will shape the political future for Democrats and Republicans alike.

In upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat is trying to fend off a stiff challenge from community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, who’s running with the backing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a democratic socialist who channeled populist fervor in his successful bid last year.

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Rep. Nydia Velazquez’s preferred successor, is squaring off against first-term Assemblymember Claire Valdez, another hopeful backed by Mamdani. Like the mayor, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

And in the upstate New York fight to replace GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican Assemblymember Robert Smullen — running with the backing of the state party — is locked in a caustic battle with Anthony Constantino, President Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate.

Candidates with scant political experience are channeling the public’s exasperated mood with the expectation that restive voters will reward them. Populist anger over rising prices and Washington leadership have provided an opening to outsiders promising a new path. And this combination has created one of the most perilous political environments for incumbents since Trump’s first presidential victory a decade ago stoked an anti-establishment fire that’s burning brighter than ever.

“If you’re perceived as being part of the status quo, then you’ve got a problem,” said Republican pollster John McLaughlin. “Regardless of which party, if you’re perceived as bringing about change you’ll win. If you’re inside the beltway you’re not talking to normal people.”

New York’s closed party primary battles are a window into the broader challenges facing incumbents across the country at a time of sustained grievance over affordability and hardening partisanship. At the same time, voters are increasingly willing to be unfazed by a candidate’s baggage — be it Graham Platner in Maine or Avila Chevalier’s tweets criticizing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It paints a picture of an electorate that’s willing to embrace flawed candidates, reject a political establishment they believe has failed to deliver on their promises and eager to send a message to their perceived enemies.

“We’re in a negative partisan environment and one of the most negative partisan environments we’ve ever witnessed,” Democratic former Rep. Steve Israel said. “People will overlook blemishes in their party in order to meet the existential goal of beating the other party. That creates openings for outsiders to come in with tattoos and old social media posts.”

The mood is reflected in the polling. A statewide Siena University survey released last month found a plurality of voters, 48 percent, believe New York is heading in the wrong direction. A sizable majority — 65 percent — said the country is on the wrong track.

Cost-of-living concerns, which enabled Trump’s White House return two years ago, continue to be a major factor in global elections. In the UK, affordability woes over housing and utility rates have put the ruling Labour Party on its backfoot and threaten to short-circuit Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s tenure.

Rising gas prices in the U.S. following Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran have kept inflation stubbornly high, teeing up what’s expected to be a difficult GOP midterm. And while Democrats are feeling bullish about their prospects this November, they’re still dealing with their own, often vast, intraparty differences of opinion.

That’s especially apparent in New York, where both the leaders of the House and Senate could be situated if the Democrats have blowout wins this year. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — both from Brooklyn — are not necessarily being welcomed with open arms. Some leading congressional candidates have declined to commit to supporting Jeffries as speaker if Democrats take back the House, yet another sign of hopefuls attempting to ride an anti-incumbent — and anti-establishment — sentiment.

At a debate earlier this month, the question of backing Jeffries as speaker revealed a stark contrast between Valdez and Reynoso: the former said she’s not committed to voting yes or no, while Reynoso said he would because if one doesn’t, you “become a pariah in Congress” and “won’t get any resources” into the district.

Schumer is on even shakier ground. In debates over recent weeks, when asked if they’re in favor of the 75-year-old running for reelection in 2028, many candidates in competitive races said outright that they’re not, or dodge the question. The Siena University poll released in May found Schumer’s favorable rating with New York voters statewide at only 33 percent. A majority of voters, 52 percent, hold an unfavorable view of the longtime senator — including 40 percent of Democrats.

Former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s waging a formidable challenge against Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, often argues that his campaign is to enact “bold new leadership” (despite a long career in city politics). In response to a question about Schumer running for reelection, he said, “It’s time for a new leadership in the Democratic Party.” Goldman, for his part, said: “We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city chapter of the DSA, said that “a key factor is seeing the failures of the Democratic Party to stop Donald Trump two elections now.” In previous cycles, he added, it felt like “a lot of people were not in the fight.”

“The national political situation has changed that for so many people, and that’s what created this hunger,” Gordillo said.

Voters’ willingness to buck incumbents has been long-simmering — and reached a boiling point in last year’s mayoral election after Mamdani, then a member of the Assembly, ran as an outsider to topple both embattled then-Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“Coming off of a year when so many Democratic voters felt so cynical and disaffected by the Democratic Party, there were glimmers of hope in New York when someone like Zohran was elevated, to show, ‘Okay, we can transform this party by transforming leadership,’” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, the progressive group that helped boost the Squad. “Our job is to take that momentum from Zohran’s victory and show voters you don’t have to stop here.”

The group is backing Valdez and recruited Avila Chevalier, who seemed like a gamble just weeks ago as the race was still flying under the radar. And while that campaign is still expected to be a tough battle, the suddenly high-profile nature of the race — sparked by Mamdani’s endorsement of Avila Chevalier and millions of dollars in spending from pro-Espaillat entities — is evidence that it was at least worth a shot for Justice Democrats, which had a brutal 2024 cycle when Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were both defeated in primaries.

The power of incumbency has for years made knocking out officeholders an uphill battle. And for retiring incumbents, that power would almost guarantee their hand-picked successor would follow them. But even that’s not enough this cycle, as evidenced in the crowded primary for outgoing Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler’s seat, which has been anything but a glide path for his heir apparent, state Assemblymember Micah Lasher. His opponents have sought to frame themselves as “outsiders” — even if many of them do have political ties — from fellow Assemblymember Alex Bores’ assertion that he’s a victim of Big Tech’s ire to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg’s argument that he’s not beholden to any super PACs.

Still, some contend that experience is needed in this political climate. A super PAC backing Reynoso recently put out advertisements positioning him as someone “ready to fight back” — compared to Valdez, who has “barely a year in office.” Goldman has repeatedly made the argument that his seniority in Congress is too much to give up, arguing that Lander would be a “rookie” on Blue Light News, where legislating is more difficult given the partisan divides. And in a recent debate, Espaillat charged that Avila Chevalier “doesn’t know legislation.”

”This is a critical time in America,” Espaillat said. ”We need a fighter, somebody that really knows government.”

In New York and across the country, the playing field has been leveled significantly between incumbents and political newcomers — thanks in large part to social media turbocharging fundraising and widespread voter dissatisfaction.

Further complicating matters is partisan redistricting creating fewer swing seats, but increasingly deep blue or ruby red districts where the more competitive race is often the primary.

“You just have to care about not pissing off Trump if you’re a Republican,” former GOP Rep. John Katko said. “If you’re a Democrat you have to worry about not upsetting the far left. The cards are so stacked because of gerrymandering.”