If House Republicans want to be successful when they assume the majority in January, they’ll push each other to keep their promises, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Tuesday.
Speaking to a packed room at The Bloggers Briefing, Jordan quoted former House GOP leader and current FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey: “When we act like us, we win. When we act like them, we lose.”
“When we stick to our principles, good things happen,” Jordan said. “They’re the party of government. We’re the party of principles. We’ve got to stick to our principles.”
Not that he assumes that will be easy: He knows majority status brings with it new difficulties.
“It’s much easier to act like us when we’re in the minority,” he said. “It’s harder to act like us when we’re in the majority. … That’s the challenge when you’re in the majority — doing it in a right way, picking the right fight, choosing the right issues and then pushing your conference to do what we told our voters we were going to do when we got the job.”
When it comes to prodding his colleagues, Jordan has plenty of experience. As early as 1994, when he was first elected to the Ohio legislature and Ohio Republicans introduced welfare reform legislation, Jordan insisted the bill include a little “tough love.” In spite of dubious colleagues and a speaker full of excuses, he introduced an amendment to force able-bodied adults off of welfare after two years of receiving benefits but not working. Some Democrats who initially supported the legislation removed their signatures, but the amendment passed and Jordan learned his first lesson about the value of firm convictions.
It wasn’t the last time he was willing to offer a principled alternative to the status quo. Most recently, as chairman of the Republican Study Committee’s Budget and Spending Task Force, Jordan introduced the only balanced budget alternative to President Obama’s budget.
He’s just as determined to remain steadfast on social issues.
“We all know what the elections were about: cutting spending, not raising taxes on a single American and repealing health care,” he said. “I would add a fourth thing: not forgetting those basic human values that make us a great country in the first place — respect for human life, respect for the family and that key institution that ultimately determines the health of our entire culture, and respect for the [hard] work ethic and the free market.”
The modern Republican Party, Jordan said, has always stood for four things: strong defense, fewer taxes, less spending and traditional values.
“All four have got to be in play,” he said. Keeping them in play, in Jordan’s view, won’t include compromising.
“People talk about the word ‘compromising,’” he said. “Typically, when the left talks about ‘compromising,’ it means doing things their way and that’s not what we want to do.”
Nor, he says, is that what the election was about.
“The election was not about compromising; it was about stopping,” he said. “It was about stopping what they’re doing, stopping the tax increases, stopping the crazy spending, stopping the health care bill. … I don’t know if we can work with these guys [on the left] much. I think more importantly we’ve got to do what we told people we would do.”
Tina Korbe is a reporter in the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
