A stunning 220 House Republicans voted to elect Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana as their new speaker of the House on Wednesday, ending three weeks of uncertainty, tumult, and legislative paralysis that have plagued the lower chamber since Kevin McCarthy’s October 3 ouster.
But even though the party has united around a new speaker, many members predict that the deep internal divisions exposed in recent weeks will have lasting impacts on the institutional health of the House GOP for the foreseeable future.
Johnson’s speakership comes as especially welcome news to moderate Republicans like Representative Don Bacon (R., Neb.), who received thousands of phone calls last week amid his refusal to back House Judiciary Chairman and former Speaker-Designate Jim Jordan in three rounds of voting. Some of the calls that explicitly mentioned Bacon’s opposition to Jordan’s speaker bid included death threats against the Nebraska congressman and his family, according to voicemail transcripts and audio recordings obtained by National Review.
WARNING: The following audio recordings contain graphic language. Listener discretion is advised.
“You’re a piece of s***,” says one anonymous caller, who later mentions Bacon’s opposition to Jordan’s speaker bid. “I hope you fing die. I hope your wife fing dies. Again, not a threat. It’s just wishful thinking. I hope your kids fing burn alive like these Israeli families. You fing pig.”
“Hey, donkey, you’re a fing pig flesh-eating bastard,” says another caller. “If you don’t vote for Jim Jordan, you’re not gonna be able to walk down the street, plain and simple. You fing RINO. You’re a c**t.”
These voicemails, which Bacon’s office has handed over to the U.S. Capitol Police and Sergeant at Arms and also shared with NR, are one small part of the massively complicated speaker saga that has tormented the House GOP since October 3. Newly elected Speaker Johnson, the low-profile Louisiana Republican nominated by his colleagues late Tuesday evening, was the party’s fourth speaker-designee in three weeks after House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer were all unable to win enough support from the House GOP conference to secure the gavel.
Keenly aware of their whip counts, neither Scalise nor Emmer took his speaker fight to the House floor. But Jordan and his surrogates took a far more aggressive approach.
As National Review reported last week, Jordan supporters in Congress and conservative media made the bold calculation that unlike hardline conservative members — many of whom are used to being a thorn in leadership’s side — moderate and mainstream Republicans are not used to getting so much flak from outside groups. Their prediction was that these members would fold to public pressure once their opposition became public.
That strategy ended up backfiring spectacularly. As the floor votes raged on, more and more Republicans — including Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R., Iowa), Nick LaLota (R., N.Y.), and Drew Ferguson (R., Ga.) — released statements claiming their offices and families had received death threats for refusing to support the Ohio Republican’s speaker bid. Politico reported last week that Bacon’s wife had received threatening text messages and emails about her husband’s refusal to support Jordan’s bid. After three failed floor votes, Jordan and his team finally saw the writing on the wall. He gathered the House GOP conference behind closed doors for another secret ballot vote and lost renomination as speaker-designate, allowing the search for McCarthy’s successor to continue.
Bacon believes the death threats that his office received are directly linked to the pressure campaign that Jordan and his surrogates placed on holdouts during the Ohio Republican’s short-lived speaker bid.
“I didn’t tell anybody I was opposed to Jim Jordan — other than maybe family — until Jim Jordan called me,” Bacon told National Review in an interview. “When he called me I said, ‘I can’t support you Jim because of what you and your supporters did to Steve Scalise and what your supporters did to McCarthy – it’s rewarding bad behavior.’ And within 30 minutes, my name is all over the internet. And there’s no doubt that somebody on his team put that out there.”
Jordan spokesman Russell Dye condemned the threats of violence, and maintained that the Ohio Republican and his team have repeatedly demanded that they stop. Dye also denied Bacon’s allegation that Jordan’s office in any way encouraged threats of intimidation or violence against the Ohio Republican’s detractors.
“Any assertion that our team was involved in any manner with these bad actors is 100 percent inaccurate,” Dye said in a statement to National Review. “Our office has not revealed private conversations between Mr. Jordan and other members and we would never encourage anyone to harass or intimidate any member or their family. Mr. Bacon is a respected member of the Republican conference and we look forward to our continued friendship with him and his office in the future.”
Bacon also lays blame on conservative media personalities and grassroots organizers for stoking the fire during the chaos and demanding that anyone who voted against Jordan ought to be primaried. He cites two populist conservative social media personalities — ‘@DC_Draino’ and Students for Trump Founder Ryan Fournier — who falsely claimed in social media posts this week that Bacon had explicitly compared the MAGA movement to the Nazi regime. The two accounts have more than one million followers each.
Both posts seem to be a direct response to a social-media post Bacon wrote deriding the Trump-aligned “America First” ideology as being “right out of the 1930s.”
Bacon said his post was a reference to the America First movement spearheaded by military aviator and foreign-policy isolationist Charles Lindbergh — not Nazi Germany. “[Lindbergh] didn’t want us involved to support Great Britain against Nazi Germany. That’s historical. But somehow these guys don’t know their history,” Bacon says in an interview. “They took it as me calling them Nazis. But no, it was a political philosophy here in America.”
“There is a whole ecosystem — people with a million followers that sow out conspiracy theories, half truths, demagoguery, and people thrive on it,” Bacon added. “Unfortunately, it’s part of our party and it’s disgraceful.”