Republicans drop Jim Jordan as their House speaker nominee

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans abruptly dropped Rep. Jim Jordan on Friday as their nominee for House speaker, making the decision during a closed-door session after the hard-edged ally of Donald Trump failed badly on a third ballot for the gavel.

The outcome left Republicans dejected, frustrated and sinking deeper into turmoil, another week without a House speaker bordering on a full-blown crisis. House Republicans have no realistic or working plan to unite the fractured GOP majority, elect a new speaker and return to the work of Congress that has been languishing since hard-liners ousted Kevin McCarthy at the start of the month.

Afterward, Jordan said simply of his colleagues, “We put the question to them, they made a different decision.”

The hard-charging Judiciary Committee chairman said House Republicans now need to come together and “figure out who our speaker is going to be.”

Their majority control floundering, Republicans left the private session blaming one another for the divisions they have created. Next steps were highly uncertain, as a wide range of Republican lawmakers started pitching themselves for speaker.

But it appears no one at present can win a GOP majority, leaving the House without a speaker and unable to function for the foreseeable future, an embarrassing blow to a central U.S. seat of government.

“We’re in a very bad place right now,” McCarthy said.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise said they would “start over” Monday. New nominees are to come forward for a candidate forum and internal party votes.

Exasperated with no easy solutions in sight, Rep. Mark Alford, a freshman from Missouri, was far from alone in expressing his anger and disappointment.

“I gave up my career to come here to do something for America, to rebuild our military, to get spending under control, to secure our border — and here we are in this quicksand,” he said.

In a floor vote Friday morning, Jordan’s third reach for the gavel, he lost 25 Republican colleagues, worse than he had fared earlier in the week, and leaving him far from the majority needed.

A founder of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Jordan’s run essentially collapsed in large part because more centrist