Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is forging ahead with his bid to become House speaker and suggested he intends to hold votes this weekend if he does not win on Friday.
Jordan’s office announced a Friday morning press conference late on Thursday night. House lawmakers are expected to hold a third round speaker vote later Friday morning after Jordan failed to clinch a majority of the chamber in two rounds of voting this week.
‘Our plan this weekend is to get a speaker elected to the House of Representatives soon as possible, so we can help the American people,’ Jordan told reporters.
Jordan called on Congress to ‘get to work’ and cited the crisis in the Middle East as well as the looming government funding deadline on Nov. 17.
‘We’ve got important work to do, important work to do. We need to help Israel. We need to get the appropriations process moving so that the key elements of our government are funded and funded in the right way, particularly our military,’ Jordan said.
‘We need to get back to our committee work and frankly, we need to continue the oversight work that I think is so darn important. In short, we need to get to work for the American people.’
The GOP bomb-thrower fell 17 votes short of a 217-threshold majority on Tuesday, and then 18 votes short on Wednesday.
Tentative plans for a Thursday vote were scuttled as GOP lawmakers huddled behind closed doors for nearly four hours trying to figure out how to move forward.
The House has been paralyzed for more than two weeks since ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster by eight Republicans and every House Democrat.
It’s not immediately clear what kind of path forward Jordan has. Multiple holdouts who met with him on Thursday told reporters their minds remained unchanged.
Nevertheless, Jordan brushed off questions about what he intends to do if he loses again Friday, insisting the best way to get the House back in order was to elect a speaker.
‘Between the first and the second vote, you all said we’re going to lose ten, 15 votes…We picked up a few. We lost a few. I think the ones we lost can come back,’ Jordan said.
‘So look, there’s been multiple rounds of votes for speaker before. We all know that. I just know that we need to get a speaker as soon as possible, so we can get to work for the American people.’