Gingrich believes Rep. Jim Jordan will be next House speaker

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered up his praise for Rep. Jim Jordan, saying that he thinks the Ohio Republican will be elected the next House speaker on Tuesday.

“I think Jordan will be a very strong, very compelling speaker. I think he will represent the whole party. He gets it,” Mr. Gingrich said to Sean Hannity on Fox News Monday night. “I think he will be very smart at getting things done.”

Mr. Gingrich took Mr. Jordan’s wrestling career as a sign that he would be good at the job.

“I think there’s one thing people need to know about Jim Jordan. In his wrestling career, he was 156-1, he won two national championships,” said Mr. Gingrich, who also writes a column for The Washington Times. “And if you know competitive wrestlers, they’re very focused, they’re very determined, they have an enormous instinct for figuring out how to get the other person to lose.”

“Jordan is a very serious, very competent person,” he said of the House Judiciary Committee chairman.

Mr. Gingrich thinks that Mr. Jordan will win the speakership either on the first or the second ballot. Mr. Jordan needs 217 votes to win the gavel, which he still doesn’t seem to have.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana won the Republican’s support for the role last week, but withdrew his name when he realized he didn’t have enough votes to win. Now Mr. Jordan is trying to avoid the same thing happening to him.

The former House speaker believes that the more moderate Republicans in the conference who were angry with Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven other Republicans who “betrayed their party” by ousting Speaker Kevin McCarthy will come to vote for Mr. Jordan.

“I suspect almost every Republican now understands with the war going on in Israel, with the war going on in Ukraine, with the problems we have on the border, this is not a time for the House Republican Party to look childish and silly and in disarray,” Mr. Gingrich said.

He also said that he thinks Mr. McCarthy “did the right thing for the country” by working in a bipartisan way to keep the government open.

“He’s got the same deadlines McCarthy did,” Mr. Gingrich said of Mr. Jordan. “I do think, frankly, having the government still open with the war going on in Israel vindicates McCarthy’s judgment. He did the right thing for the country even if it made eight people angry at him in the conference.”