NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he ancient Greeks were well-informed about eternal torments of the afterlife, as one would expect from a people whose mythical women were frequently ravished by gods in the guise of wild animals. Tantalus was forever fated to claw for fruit from branches that shrank from reach, or try and slake his thirst with water that drained away as he brought his mouth to it. (To be fair, he earned this fate by feeding his son, in a stew, to the gods of Olympus at a banquet — a party foul in any era.) The faithless Danaïdes, who slaughtered their husbands on their wedding night, were condemned to spend eternity carrying water in a sieve to fill a leaking amphora. The Titan Prometheus — he who gave humanity the forbidden gifts of fire and knowledge — wasn’t even allowed the dignity of death; the gods simply chained him to a mountainside and let a giant bird gorge itself agonizingly on his forever-regenerating liver. (In a true mafiosi move, they also set his good-natured dunce of a brother up as the patsy for humanity’s woes by gifting him with an irresponsible girlfriend and a box marked “DO NOT OPEN.”)

This discussion of shame and damnation naturally brings us to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — would-be Republican speaker of the House and certainly the cleverest man in any given room by his own estimation — who is currently living out the agonies of Sisyphus, forever pushing a boulder up a steep hill only to lose his grip just before reaching the crest and tumbling back down. For those not following along with the ongoing carnival of self-degradation in the House of Representatives, a brief primer will suffice: After Kevin McCarthy was toppled as speaker of the House by Matt Gaetz and similarly inclined malcontents, Steve Scalise mounted a bid to replace him. Scalise was told in conference by Jim Jordan, his losing intra-conference rival for the position, that “America wants me” — a charming moment sure to remind anyone in the room familiar with Jim Jordan’s personal affect of every other interaction they have ever had with the man. But then Scalise himself failed to close the deal for various reasons, which meant it was the turn of the Donald Trump–endorsed Jordan to try to garner 217 votes on the floor of the House in a bid for speaker.

It isn’t going so well. Jordan lost 20 votes from the House Republican conference in his first failed attempt at a floor vote on Tuesday, including Ken Buck, who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy in the first place. Convinced he could do better a second time, Jordan took to lobbying holdouts to change their votes. The result: In round two on Wednesday, he lost 22 votes from the House Republican conference. Round three awaits, and here Jordan remains as of Friday morning, promising that his bid for the speakership has not come to a humiliating end but that, as speaker-designee, he will attempt to roll the stone one more time and try to get the 22 defectors in the conference to back him. (As of this filing, no one he has spoken to has been convinced. Perhaps things will change but, as I said, it isn’t going so well.)

Why is Jim Jordan fated to be running up that hill so fruitlessly, in such humiliating fashion? Sisyphus’s great sin against the gods was that of hubris: his self-assured belief in his superior intellect and morality. Jordan’s failure is similar. Content as he has been his entire legislative career to throw bombs instead of legislate, wreak institutional havoc, and gleefully knife his fellow conference members in the back over matters of pique and self-promotion rather than principle, he is now discovering much to his surprise that some of those colleagues will never back him for any reason. Set aside for a moment the fact that opposition to Jordan’s speakership from GOP moderates is politically overdetermined. (As the Trump-endorsed House Republican avatar of January 6 and a man whose knowledge at the time of a rather dark athlete-molestation scandal in his past remains an open question, Jordan is kryptonite as the public face of an already unpopular GOP conference.)

Trust in the hard feelings instead, because they are real. Jordan’s lobbying tactics during the speakership race have been fresh evidence of that: Using his outside proxies and leveraging Donald Trump’s endorsement, he had his allies mobilize MAGA-world via an email push to pummel any and all holdouts against his bid. The predictable result? Death threats, lots and lots of death threats. (You can always count on Team MAGA to keep it classy.) Equally as obnoxiously, Jordan took to selling off Trump’s sole substantive tax-policy achievement — the cap on SALT deductions that has hit rich blue-state gentry liberals squarely in the chops — like a mess of pottage to court the votes of New York and California moderates, which puts the brutal lie to whatever “purity conservative” bona fides he spent the rest of his life accumulating like cheap participation trophies.

There is a secondary aspect to the calculation among Republican holdouts in the House, however, one perhaps more unshakeable than their personal disdain for Jordan: a belief that Matt Gaetz and his ilk cannot be allowed to be rewarded for what they have done. To install the Trump-endorsed Jordan as speaker would be to fully legitimize Gaetz’s irresponsibly destructive and self-promoting coup attempt as well as to brand the GOP as the “Chaos Party” for the foreseeable future. New rules will inevitably be written in the next Congress — either an increased majority or, alas, a minority will effectively solve the problem — but lashing oneself to Jim Jordan as speaker of the House for the time being means not only having to answer for the fact that he (with all his baggage) is now your leader, but also having to answer for Matt Gaetz and his tactics — a tough lift for anyone in a marginal district even if they have the appetite for it.

It is difficult to feel little other than a grim, classicist’s sense of moral closure in Jim Jordan’s serial public humiliation, given the way he has conducted his career. But there are greater stakes that one cannot be so cavalier about. What afterward? Who comes next if Jordan fails again? It has now been over two weeks since Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House by men and women who seemingly had no plan for what came next other than “YOLO,” and speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry has already said he will sooner resign his office than see his acting powers expanded to “bridge the gap” as a Band-Aid until January 2025. (There are solid institutional reasons for his position.) If that holds true, and nobody in the conference is capable of getting to 217 Republican votes alone, then the worst-case scenario starts to become plausible: a power-sharing agreement with Democrats to secure votes for a speaker. The fallout from that would be unspeakably damaging for the unity of the Republican Party — for people who enjoy the ancient Chinese curse about “living in interesting times,” you might actually witness a major American party rip itself apart for the first time since the antebellum Whigs.

President Biden spoke to America last night requesting a $105 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. It is a matter the House should immediately act upon. It sits outside the formal abilities of a speaker pro tempore as currently defined to move such legislation, meaning that until either those rules are altered or a speaker is finally chosen, nothing can be done. This, to name but one urgent example, is the true torment of what House radicals have inflicted upon America with their ill-considered and irrevocable tantrum. In deposing McCarthy without any ability to agree upon a replacement, they have forced us all to become unwilling participants — unhappy spectators at least — to a world where their repeated inability to come together in a time of international crisis is making the myth of Sisyphus a reality.