In the backdrop of the controversies about who is to be voted Speaker of the House of Representatives is the awareness that this role is third in line for the presidency.
The current president seems barely functional.
The number two in line is absent without leave, never qualified in any sense, and is universally regarded as a joke if she is regarded at all, which she mostly is not.
That leaves the Speaker of the House, very close to the center of power.
For many people in Washington, this is a huge problem.
The uniparty decided some years ago never to allow another “populist” - meaning someone who actually responds to the public in reality and not just in rhetoric - near the center of power.
When the spot suddenly opened up, thanks to a vote pushed by a rebellious member, it threw the place into chaos.
Jim Jordan of Ohio stepped up as the most respected and popular member among the grassroots of the party.
Everyone has seen him on television. In his activism, he is everywhere at once, and a passionate opponent of business as usual on Capitol Hill.
By any normal standard, he was a shoo-in, provided the grassroots gets their way.
The phones lit up for days and days, with people calling and demanding an on-record vote and ready to punish lawmakers who shrunk from their responsibilities.
Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the few national politicians with real backbone combined with high intelligence, has the highest respect for Jordan.
Here is what Massie wrote in the thick of battle.
These are important words:
“I’ve taken thousands of votes during my time in Congress. No roll call has been as clarifying as the one for Jim Jordan as Speaker. Why isn’t his election easy here? Because his leadership represents a credible threat to the unchecked growth of our bloated federal government.”
Of course the mainstream media described Jordan as far-right and a Trump guy, which certainly gives the wrong impression, if those words mean anything at all beyond signaling “we don’t like him.”
What he is in fact is the best investigator of deep-state machinations, a fierce debater, and a dedicated opponent of corruption and big government on all fronts.
He is a good representative of the most prescient and powerful ideas within the GOP. Most especially, he has a bead on the administrative state as the hidden enemy of the U.S. Constitution and American liberty generally.
And this is precisely why certain powers-that-be in Washington, D.C. were absolutely dedicated to making sure that he could not get this close to the center of power. The urgency these days to keep the racket going and keep rebels at bay has become extremely intense.
The deep state wants to keep a lid on it. They are behaving as Machiavelli described the wise prince, better feared than loved. Also like the prince, they would rather crush and destroy than give small offenses that can be avenged. In the case of any authentic representative of the populist movement, there is zero tolerance. This is why the D.C. insiders have yanked at every possible lever of influence to keep Jordan from the speaker’s chair.
Here’s the critical issue.
The administrative state that has long run Washington, D.C. has two main branches, the old civilian bureaucracy that presumes as a matter of course that it is really in charge of the country, plus a deeper layer of the intelligence community that knows for sure that it is the real power running the nation.
They have both lived in the shadows for a very long time without members of the general public discovering it is the fourth and most important branch of government.
It’s not in the Constitution but it runs things no matter what.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a real turning point.
Here is where the panic set in.
The ridiculous claim that Russia was responsible for his election was the first psyop. It took years and vast resources but that supposed investigation turned up nothing of any substance at all. It was worse than a partisan attack. It was the old Washington fighting for its life against something they truly feared.
That turned out to be only the beginning. The worst of it came when they finally deployed the ultimate Trump-crushing scheme, the response to a virus that led him to greenlight lockdowns, which led to trillions in spending, money creation, and explosive welfare payments, not to mention a huge attack on the property rights of just about everyone. The only beneficiaries were the big businesses that hated him, and the Democrats who gamed the virus fears to liberalize mail-in ballots used to cause his loss of the White House.
Part of the motivation here was Trump’s clever scheme to reclassify deep-state employees as subject to the president and not their labor unions. That one change—finally shoved through in the weeks before the 2020 election—would have done more to drain the swamp than anything he had yet tried. That was the real moment of panic. Without a permanent and unelected deep state, the whole scheme would dry up and fundamentally falter.
The pandemic response is what finally exposed the administrative state to the general public, and gave rise to a next-level mass movement determined to stop this robbery of the American idea. That’s where we are today: a tremendous and existential struggle between the people and the deep state, exactly as portrayed in every dystopian novel. Get that and you understand most every headline in the American press today.
And it’s not just the United States. This great struggle is taking place all over the world. It’s a battle between the elites and the people. The former have all the power but the latter have the passion and the ideas. What happens now really depends on an iterative series of steps that seemingly have nothing to do with the big picture but actually they do.
The election of Jim Jordan as speaker of the House is part of that grand struggle, one of many more to come in the years ahead. This is why there are so many people determined to stop it from happening. If someone like this can be third in line to the presidency, where does that leave the permanent bureaucracy in D.C. and all the interest groups for whom they carry water?
As of this writing, we don’t know the final outcome.
But this much we know for sure: this is only the beginning of a very long battle to take back the powers of government for the people.
