Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) believes the Republicans will maintain their majority in the House through the November midterm elections—achieving that victory is “priority number one” he said during an interview with Townhall.
If that mission is accomplished, Rep. Jordan hopes to succeed outgoing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as the next Speaker of the House—and if he’s successful in his bid for the Speakership, his objective is to follow through on that which voters were promised, he explained, to “do what we said.”
This entails exercising the “political will” to fight for the issues that American citizens elected them to fight for and it also involves reforming issues related to process, according to Rep. Jordan.
The House Republican Steering Committee’s current “top-down model” concentrates too much power in just a few people’s hands and it should be changed into a “bottom-up model” Rep. Jordan explained.
There would be a higher likelihood of passing “policies consistent with what you were elected to do if in fact it’s a bottom-up grassroots model, not one controlled just by a few people at the top,” he said.
Rep. Jordan believes that each member of the Steering Committee should only have one vote and each member on the Committee should be elected to the Committee—but currently some members wield the power of weighted votes and some of the members are not elected to the committee.
The Speaker of the House gets four votes and the Majority Leader gets two, but as Jordan noted, the Speaker basically has five votes because he also gets to appoint someone to the Steering Committee who isn’t elected to the Committee, and that person “will in essence just vote with the Speaker,” he explained.
The House Republican Steering Committee currently chooses the chairman and members for the standing committees, but Rep. Jordan said that each of these committees should choose their own chairman, meaning that the Republicans on a given committee would choose that committee’s chairman.
He also pointed to another process issue he believes should change: Citing welfare reform as an example, he noted that a variety of committees currently hold jurisdiction over different welfare programs, but he said it would be better to consolidate all of the welfare issues into one single committee that would tackle all of the various welfare reform issues.
Erecting the border wall, ensuring border security, and immigration reform stand at the forefront of issues that should be delivered to voters, and he also wants to solidify the individual tax cuts as permanent, replace Obamacare, reform welfare and ensure “equal treatment under law.” He noted the exasperation Americans experience over the “double standard” between regular citizens and “the politically connected class in Washington” or the upper echelons of the DC bureaucracy, noting that people believe Clinton, Comey, Lynch, Lerner, Page and Strzok should receive the same treatment as all other citizens.
He pointed to the passage of the massive omnibus spending bill earlier this year and how the House Republican leadership did not stand against the Democrat agenda and fight for conservative priorities. He said that the Republicans’ tendency to cave to Democrats without fighting for the priorities that people elected Republicans for would change if he secures the Speakership.