LIMA — Is there a U.S. Senate bid in Jim Jordan’s future?
“We’ll see,” the current Ohio congressman told the editorial board of The Lima News during a sit-down Wednesday morning.
The conservative lawmaker, whose 4th Congressional district stretches from Urbana to Lake Erie and includes Lima, has been among the names mentioned as a possible candidate in 2022 to replace fellow Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who earlier this week announced he would not seek re-election.
“We will look at the Senate opportunity a little, but right now I’m focused totally on the House,” Jordan said. While there is no specific timeline for making a decision on his political future, “I don’t plan on taking a lot of time” to decide, he said.
The veteran congressman did, however, rule out a primary challenge to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine as has been mentioned by political observers as a possibility.
“I don’t plan on that either,” said Jordan, who sits on the judiciary and oversight committees in the House.
Portman, in announcing he would leave his Senate seat, pointed to deep divisions in the country and the need to “tone down” the level of national discourse.
“Unfortunately it is pretty divided,” Jordan conceded. “I was at the inauguration, and I thought there were parts of President Biden’s speech that were good, especially when he called for unity. But it’s tough to unify when you’re impeaching a president who’s already left, when you have people on the left supporting the idea of canceling 75 million Americans, supporting the idea that 75 million people aren’t’ allowed to engage in their free speech rights and debate, which is what we’re seeing from the left today.
“This cancel culture mindset is attacking so many of our citizens. I wish we could unify more, but that doesn’t seem to be what the left is focused on, unfortunately,” the co-founder of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus said.
Jordan said he does not believe former President Donald Trump incited people gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 to storm the U.S. Capitol building, but he does maintain the 2020 presidential election results were not valid for a number of reasons.
“The Democrats knew they couldn’t beat President Trump without changing the election rules, and to change the election rules and the rules of the game they couldn’t do it in a constitutional fashion because in key states Republicans control the state legislatures.
“So they went to partisan courts, partisan Democrat secretaries of states and Democrat governors” to get favorable rulings from courts “who didn’t look at the issue and the merits of the cases.”
With Democrats holding the White House and majorities in the House and Senate, the veteran Ohio congressman offered no specific thoughts on what he hopes to achieve during his new two-year term.
“It will be driven by what the Biden administration and Democrats do. So far in one week’s time, it’s been a lot of left-wing executive orders. It depends on where the administration goes,” Jordan said. “Do they continue down this road of driving up energy costs and continue what they’re doing with immigration? If they want to work with us on things that are sensible, then maybe we can.”
Despite their current minority status in both houses of Congress, Jordan said the Republican Party is alive and well both locally and on a national level.
“The Republican Party is a Trump Party, that’s obvious,” he said. “There’s never been a Republican in history who garnered 75 million people to vote for him. There’s never been a president in my lifetime who has done more of what he said he would do and accomplished more than President Trump. You can run down the list: cutting taxes, reducing regulations, growing our economy, getting a (COVID-19) vaccine in a record time, three great justices on the Supreme Court … you can just keep going.
“The party is strongly behind President Trump. The handful of people who wanna try to change that are, I think, just misguided,” Jordan said. “The GOP should be an America First party; a Make America Great Again party for sure. Those who want to take it in a different direction away from the president are just wrong; I disagree with that. I don’t think it’s good for the party or the country.”
