A campaign to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan with the right-wing Rep. Jim Jordan is picking up support across the Right.
We noted a month ago that FreedomWorks, a small-government group affiliated with the Koch brothers’ political networks, had launched a petition campaign encouraging Jordan to run for Speaker. On Monday, the Tea Party Patriots released an open letter from more than 100 right-wing activists calling on Jordan to run and declaring that “a vote to promote any member of today’s House GOP leadership is a vote for the Swamp.”
The letter’s signers are a Who’s Who of leaders from the Religious Right, legal and corporate right, and Tea Party. It includes anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim activists as well as anti-tax and limited-government leaders. Among the signers are longtime conservative activists Ed Meese, Richard Viguerie and Brent Bozell; the American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon and Sandy Rios and Eagle Forum’s Eunie Smith; anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch; Tim Macy of Gun Owners of America; and Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“America needs you to declare yourself as a candidate for Speaker at once,” the letter urges:
It is imperative for the sake of the country we love and our God-given freedoms that the American people be offered another choice. They must have an alternative in the People’s House to the leadership and largely identical agendas of Republican and Democratic Swamp creatures. It’s time to “clean House.”
You must take the lead. You have demonstrated over your years on Capitol Hill an unwavering commitment to our constitutional liberties and conservative principles of free market economics, budgetary discipline, traditional values and a strong national defense. You have worked to drain the Swamp, not fill it further. And we all know what the current House Republican leadership really thinks of you and those who share your beliefs. You have established a record of responsible leadership of the kind our times demand.
Jordan was the founding chair of the Freedom Caucus in the House, which is the right wing of the right wing of the Republican caucus.
