At a Tuesday House Rules Committee hearing, Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) put Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on the spot over his past support for the idea that the 2020 presidential election outcome was in doubt. McGovern asked Jordan to state, unequivocally, that President-elect Joe Biden won the election “fair and square,” thereby helping tamp down the GOP-backed lies that led to the rioting at the Capitol last week — and Jordan petulantly refused to make such a simple statement.
Initially, McGovern commented as follows:
‘Mr. Jordan, this isn’t a both-sides issue. Our Capitol was attacked, five people are dead, countless people are wounded. We had a group of domestic terrorists — home-grown fascists — that came to the Capitol building to desecrate this symbol of democracy and freedom and to do harm to people, and with all due respect, I’m glad that all it took for you to call for unity and healing was for our freedom and our democracy to be attacked, but for the last several months, the gentleman from Ohio and others have given oxygen to the president’s conspiracy theories. We all want healing, but in order to get to healing, we need truth, and we need accountability.’
Subsequently, McGovern noted that the rioters “came here to destroy things, to desecrate things,” adding that they “did so because the president of the United States told them to go do it.” McGovern asked Jordan if he would admit that “Joe Biden won fair and square” and that “the election was not rigged or stolen,” and rather than answering in the affirmative to each of these questions and moving on, Jordan deflected.
Jordan commented as follows, attempting to defend his opposition to the certification of some of Biden’s electoral votes:
‘What I did over the past several months is follow the process that the Constitution proscribes.’
After crosstalk between the two of them, Jordan said that Biden only officially became president-elect after Congress formally certified his electoral votes, which obscures the reality of the situation. All the way back in November, the federal General Services Administration formally acknowledged Biden as the “apparent” president-elect, thereby allowing his transition team to access critical government resources. Pretending like the outcome of the presidential election was in any respect an open question when Congress met on January 6 to certify the electoral college results is ridiculous.
After McGovern, who was clearly frustrated with Jordan’s bluster, reiterated his basic question of whether Jordan would acknowledge that Biden won “fair and square,” Jordan replied that Biden “won the election because the way the process works is the last chance to object is January 6, and that objection didn’t prevail.” Jordan’s insistence that Biden “won the election” because of procedural Congressional action is false. Biden won because of the duly documented votes of over 81 million people across the country.
McGovern subsequently added as follows:
‘If we want to talk about healing, we have to talk about truth, and if we want to talk about healing, we also need to deal with the issue of accountability, and what this president incited last Wednesday is unforgivable and unconscionable.’
Jordan interrupted McGovern to claim that “in several states, the rules were changed in an unconstitutional fashion” ahead of the election, although courts have not systematically accepted this claim, no matter Jordan’s attempt to present the idea as fact. Jordan petulantly refused to state that Biden won “fair and square,” opting for the much less conclusive observation that Biden is “gonna be the president,” which leaves space wide open for the Republican Party’s delusional lies about how Biden got to that point of imminently taking power.
Watch Jordan’s petulant meltdown below:
