{"id":7853,"date":"2025-03-31T21:34:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T21:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/meet-the-republican-who-wants-to-be-the-next-jim-jordan\/"},"modified":"2025-03-31T21:34:16","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T21:34:16","slug":"meet-the-republican-who-wants-to-be-the-next-jim-jordan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/meet-the-republican-who-wants-to-be-the-next-jim-jordan\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Republican who wants to be the next Jim Jordan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Rep. Brandon Gill, the youngest Republican in the House, has a role model he\u2019s trying to emulate \u2014 and it\u2019s not Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 \u2014 landing seats on the combative Ohio Republican\u2019s committees, Judiciary and Oversight, and quickly earning a similar reputation for bare-knuckle partisan brawling.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’d like to be as close to Jim Jordan as possible,\u201d Gill said in a recent interview. \u201cI’d love to sit in there and just watch him do his committee hearings and learn from him, and get his advice on things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gill, in fact, might have learned from Jordan all too well: His latest crusade \u2014 pushing for impeachment of a federal judge who sought to block President Donald Trump’s deportation plans \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

In essence, Gill is playing the role Jordan used to occupy earlier in his career \u2014 the rabble-rouser pushing party leaders to do more, political headaches be damned. And his explanations ring pretty familiar for anyone familiar with Jordan\u2019s \u201cfollow-the-voters\u201d rhetoric<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot everybody is where I am\u201d on judicial impeachments, Gill said. \u201cI’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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gill, who has gathered the backing of more than 20 colleagues in his effort to impeach U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, said he\u2019s dead-set on promoting a more \u201cmuscular conservatism,\u201d much in the same way Jordan has urged Republicans to fight harder over his nearly two-decade congressional career.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The impeachment campaign has failed to pick up steam among old-guard conservatives who see it as an ill-fated distraction \u2014 despite Trump publicly voicing support for using Congress to wipe the bench of judges he perceives as hostile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe likelihood that you\u2019re going to impeach people for maladministration, as it\u2019s called, is just low,\u201d 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. \u201cAnd even if you did, should we be second-guessing the decisions of the [judiciary]? The answer is no.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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 \u201clegislative terrorist.\u201d Years later, Jordan sought the speaker\u2019s gavel himself, losing after more moderate colleagues held out and denied him the nod in an internal GOP vote.<\/p>\n

Gill said he doesn\u2019t 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. \u201cWe’re all on the same team here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jordan, in an interview, praised Gill as \u201ca sharp young man\u201d with a strong work ethic and said Gill didn\u2019t need his advice.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Jordan remains a darling of the MAGA right. A co-founder and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, he\u2019s a frequent guest on conservative media, has Trump\u2019s ear and controls a panel with jurisdiction over marquee issues like law enforcement, immigration and gun rights.<\/p>\n

Now Gill is looking to fashion himself as someone who embodies Jordan\u2019s 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 \u2014 a complementary effort to the Department of Government Efficiency initiative headed up by Elon Musk, with whom Jordan has a longstanding relationship<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gill has even deeper ties to hard-right conservatism. A former Wall Street investment banker, he married the daughter of conservative commentator Dinesh D\u2019Souza 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 \u201cwere belittled and insulted for being a white male constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much like his father-in-law \u2014 the activist behind a film promoting discredited conspiracies about election fraud that’s widely popular with the far right \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrandon 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,\u201d Omar said in a statement. \u201cHe is nothing more than a xenophobic fame-chaser, nepo-baby that never had to work for anything in his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve always been conservative, but the more you’re around rabid leftists, that’s what red-pills you,\u201d Gill said.<\/p>\n

Gill recalled that one of his first memories of meeting Jordan was on the set of his father-in-law\u2019s movie \u201cPolice State,\u201d 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<\/a> to \u201cprotect conservative values from Washington elites.\u201d Trump endorsed Gill in that primary, too.<\/p>\n

Gill spoke effusively about Jordan in a recent interview, calling him \u201cthe best of the best\u201d 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\u2019 future government funding, Gill said he texted Jordan to pick his brain on how he prepared for the proceedings.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and in the eyes of his critics, potentially provoking a constitutional crisis \u2014 he said he\u2019s more than willing to push boundaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this boils down to a basic question of, are we going to allow the Republic to survive or not?\u201d said Gill of his political motivations. \u201cAnd if it’s going to survive, we\u2019ve got to start being a lot more aggressive with how we play politics. The left plays to win. They play for keeps.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rep. Brandon Gill, the youngest Republican in the House, has a role model he\u2019s trying to emulate \u2014 and it\u2019s not Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln. It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}