WASHINGTON ― One of the 20 Republicans who voted against Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in his bid for House speaker on Tuesday says he did so because Jordan won’t state that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) challenged Jordan to say the election wasn’t stolen during a party meeting last week. He said he raised the issue again during a one-on-one meeting with Jordan on Monday evening but came away unsatisfied.
Jordan did not respond to questions from reporters on Tuesday about whether he believed the 2020 election had been stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Buck told HuffPost that Jordan “was more involved ― and I’m not saying culpable in any way ― but just more knowledgeable and involved in the whole challenging the election.”
Jordan repeatedly echoed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and met with him to coordinate the Republican response. He also was in touch with the then-president on Jan. 6, 2021, before and during the siege of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
During the vote for speaker, Buck cast his ballot for Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) instead of Jordan. The other anti-Jordan Republicans split their votes among six people who, like Emmer, weren’t even candidates.
Jordan has said the House will hold another vote on his bid for the gavel. Back in January, it took Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) 15 rounds of voting to become speaker. The House has been leaderless since a small group of eight Republicans, a group including Buck, triggered a snap no-confidence vote on McCarthy earlier this month.
A person close to Republican leadership said Buck has been trying to stand out from his GOP colleagues so he can launch a TV career, which Buck has denied.
After Tuesday’s vote, Buck joined CNN to expand his attack on Jordan’s efforts to support Trump. Jordan has marshaled committee resources to investigate the supposed “weaponization of government” against Trump, who faces multiple criminal indictments, and proposed cutting funding for some Justice Department operations.
“I think what Jim Jordan needs to do is stop talking about defunding the Department of Justice,” Buck said. “We pride ourselves on being a party of rule of law. You can’t defund the Department of Justice or defund a special counsel’s office in the Department of Justice and talk about the values that we share.”
Buck said that during their meeting on Monday evening, Jordan told him that he believed the Pennsylvania secretary of state had taken unconstitutional action to allow the counting of certain mail-in ballots after the 2020 election.
“He doesn’t know how the election would have turned out if they had not taken that unconstitutional action,” Buck said Jordan told him.
Buck noted that he himself had supported congressional Republicans’ legal effort to stop states from certifying their election results at the time. But Buck has since disavowed any suggestion that the 2020 election was improper.
“If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country, period,” Buck said last week.