Connect with us

Congress

Meet the Republican who wants to be the next Jim Jordan

Published

on

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.”

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Congress

Capitol agenda: Trump’s Doral demands ripple through GOP

Published

on

President Donald Trump’s demand that Congress pass an expanded version of the SAVE America Act is creating headaches for both chambers.

The president told House Republicans on Monday the sweeping GOP elections overhaul bill — with several key add-ons — should be their “No. 1 priority.” It’s upending their plans to discuss other premidterms priorities during the retreat Tuesday — and raising eyebrows among some senators back in Washington.

— How it’s playing in Doral: The House has passed two versions of the GOP elections bill already, but now the president wants to tack on limits to mail voting, a ban on transgender surgeries for minors and a prohibition on transgender women participating in women’s sports.

GOP leaders now have to drum up support from members reluctant to dive into the culture war of transgender politics when they’d prefer to focus on affordability. And the mail voting provision was left off the package last time for a reason.

Committee chairs will brief members Tuesday on their legislative priorities, including the possibility of a new reconciliation bill this year. But Trump made no mention of that possibility during his remarks Monday, which does not bode well for those seeking a second megabill.

Elected Republican leaders will then huddle privately at 4 p.m. to discuss paths forward. Expect Trump’s SAVE America demands to be a big part of the conversation.

The GOP leaders will also discuss how to pass a housing affordability package — though that, too, doesn’t appear to be a priority for Trump, who said Monday that Americans are demanding the election bill and “don’t talk about housing.”

— More trouble for Thune: Trump’s ultimatum further complicates matters in the Senate, where there the legislation is on the rocks even without the president’s new demands.

Several Republican senators signaled Monday they aren’t behind the president’s call to significantly limit mail-in ballots, touting the success of the practice in their own states.

“I don’t want the federal government telling me that I can’t have mail-in voting or absentee ballot voting,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters. “There’s nothing wrong with mail-in voting if you have the right standards in place.”

Trump also kept pressing on the “talking filibuster,” keeping that internal battle front and center for Majority Leader John Thune, who delivered a public reality check on the “complicated and risky” idea Monday.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), in a sign of how desperate some Republicans are to avoid a bruising internal filibuster fight, floated passing the SAVE America Act through reconciliation Monday, despite the lack of a clear budget connection.

“We have some clever wordsmiths,” Kennedy said.

What else we’re watching: 

— Immigration policy hearings: Two Senate hearings Tuesday will put a spotlight on key immigration policy debates — birthright citizenship and so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will host a 10:30 a.m. hearing on jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement; witnesses will include Chad Wolf, Trump’s former acting DHS secretary.

A Senate Judiciary panel will then hold a 2:30 p.m. hearing on “Protecting American Citizenship” as the Supreme Court mulls whether to void Trump’s effort to end automatic birthright citizenship for those born in the U.S.

— Race to replace MTG: It’s Election Day to fill the seat of Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose retirement from Congress in January narrowed an already thin Republican House majority. The bad news for the GOP: The race might drag on another month.

Seventeen candidates are on the ballot, including 12 Republicans. And because so many candidates filed, it’s possible no one emerges with the 50 percent required to win, leaving the seat open until after the potential April 7 runoff.

Hailey Fuchs and Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Congress

SAVE America Act is ‘No. 1 priority,’ Trump tells Republicans

Published

on

DORAL, Florida — President Donald Trump told House Republicans Monday to pass a major partisan elections bill a third time with new provisions, saying it should be the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” ahead of the midterm elections.

“It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told lawmakers gathered at his golf resort. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”

The president spent 13 minutes at the close of a nearly hourlong address making crystal-clear he expects Speaker Mike Johnson and other top leaders to meet his demands. The House has already two passed versions of what is now called the “SAVE America Act” that would institute tough new citizenship and photo ID requirements for voting.

But Trump asked the gathered lawmakers to add in provisions curbing mail voting and targeting transgender rights — even it means abandoning the remainder of their legislative agenda before the November elections.

“Let’s go for the gold,” he said. “It’s actually a matter in a serious way of national survival. We can’t have these elections going on like this anymore.”

The already passed version of the SAVE America Act is awaiting a Senate vote. Majority Leader John Thune has committed to calling it up, but it is certain to be blocked by Democrats under the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster threshold.

Some conservatives, with Trump’s backing are looking to sidestep that obstacle with a “talking filibuster” that would force Democrats to hold the floor. Thune and other Senate Republicans are skeptical it would work without a rules change, but Trump said Monday failure was not an option.

“They have to get it done,” he said of the Senate. “If it takes you six months — I’m for not approving anything. … I don’t think we should approve anything until this is approved.”

Trump also endorsed a push by some House Republican hard-liners to attach a must-pass spy powers extension to the SAVE America legislation in a bid to pass both together — creating a nightmare for House GOP leaders who already face obstacles passing either bill.

He cast the voting and transgender provisions as proven political winners that Democrats would be hard-pressed to oppose, even though they have so far stayed almost entirely united against the legislation.

“That should be the easiest thing to get passed that you’ve ever had,” Trump said. “Those are best of Trump. This is the No. 1 priority, it should be, for the House.”

Continue Reading

Congress

Rising energy prices threaten cornerstone of GOP midterm pitch

Published

on

DORAL, Florida — The economic fallout from President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran is imperiling the GOP’s legislative sales pitch ahead of the midterms, with energy price spikes threatening at least some of the pocketbook gains Americans are seeing from the sweeping tax cuts Republicans enacted last year.

Analysts with the Wall Street advisory and investment firm Evercore ISI estimated Monday that the impact on household costs attributable to the current crisis could erase the tax benefits from the “big, beautiful bill” for at least the bottom 30 percent of Americans — even if oil prices come off their $100-plus-per-barrel highs.

Some top Republicans acknowledged rising energy prices are cause for political concern.

“The price of gas is always kind of a benchmark,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday. “I do think the fact that we’ve increased our supply here domestically will help ease it, but it’s something obviously we’ve got to pay attention to. And hopefully the operations in Iran … won’t be an extended situation.”

The impact of higher gas prices is hitting just as House Republicans gather for their annual policy retreat at Trump’s resort in Doral, Florida. The evidence could be seen just outside the gates, where regular gas was retailing at multiple stations for $3.59 per gallon — up about 70 cents from the Miami-area average on Jan. 1, according to GasBuddy.com.

The hope among Republicans gathered at the resort is that the crisis is short-lived, with several saying they believed Trump’s assurances that the supply bottlenecks caused by Iran’s effective blockade of the Persian Gulf would soon ease.

“I believe there’s a lot of emotion built into energy prices,” Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) said in an interview. “I would look for things to settle down very soon.”

But other Republicans granted anonymity to speak candidly expressed real alarm as crude oil prices surged to nearly $120 a barrel overnight before settling later in the day below $90 — still about 30 percent above recent lows.

“If you are a Republican and not concerned right now, you are stupid,” one House Republican said, adding, “Hopefully, we will square this away sooner than later.”

Another House Republican, asked if the wartime crisis threatened to overshadow the benefits of the GOP megabill, replied, “Hell yes.”

“The most sensitive thing amongst most driving Americans is the price of gasoline,” the person added, saying it threatens to send Americans “right up the wall.”

Trump is scheduled to address lawmakers in Doral shortly after markets close Monday, and they will be listening closely to his message on the hostilities in the Middle East and his plans to address high energy prices. He has announced plans to get oil shipments moving through the Gulf again, including by providing naval escorts for tankers and backstopping insurance for vessels.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that oil prices will “drop dramatically once the objectives of Operation Epic Fury are achieved.”

“President Trump and his entire energy team have had a strong game plan to keep the energy markets stable well before Operation Epic Fury began, and they will continue to review all credible options,” she said.

But the president so far has shown little interest in pushing his party to foremost focus on legislation tackling affordability, as some of his political aides have advised. Instead, Trump is pressing Senate Republicans to pass a sweeping GOP elections overhaul bill — adding on demands for a near-complete ban on mail voting and unrelated policy provisions like banning transgender surgeries for minors.

Hours before taking the stage in front of House Republicans at his Florida resort, he reiterated his request.

Even before the oil price shock, Trump’s agenda had come with a hefty price tag for consumers. Analysts at the Tax Foundation have already determined that the president’s trade policies cost Americans $1,000 on average last year, matching the average size of refund checks that Trump officials say will ease cost-of-living concerns.

The Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs, but those that remain are projected to cost households $600 on average this year, according to the nonpartisan think tank.

House Republican leaders are hoping to keep the annual policy retreat focused on their legislative priorities ahead of the midterms. Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, the GOP Conference chair, said ahead of the retreat she hoped to firm up the party’s messaging around last year’s megabill.

But going into the Doral resort Monday, members were trained on all the reasons they hoped the politically perilous price spike would be short-lived.

House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said in an interview that reopening the Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz “would be even better for energy prices, although we’re seeing obviously a peak right now with the war going on.”

Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) said the supply crunch was “not an existential threat to us because of all the things we’ve done to make ourselves self reliant in terms of energy resources,” while acknowledging the “fungible” nature of the global oil market. He was hopeful about more ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) said in an interview a “short-term gas price hike is … not what’s important.”

“What’s important is the long term benefits of having a peaceful Iran that means that gas prices will drop dramatically for the long term,” he said. “I’m not that concerned about it.”

Sam Sutton contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Trending