‘He’s Jim Jordan With A Jacket And A Smile’: MSNBC Reporter Goes Off The Rails About New Speaker

An MSNBC reporter went off the rails Wednesday when discussing the election of Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana as speaker of the House.

Johnson was elected as speaker by a 220-209 vote in the House of Representatives the day after Republican Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota ended his bid for the speakership on Tuesday, replacing Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who was removed as speaker by a 216-210 vote on Oct. 3. “He’s Jim Jordan with a jacket and a smile,” MSNBC correspondent Ali Vitali told “Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace.

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“That’s something that when you actually start parsing through the policy comes through very clearly, that this is someone who maybe without the publicity and fanfare is certainly working in lock step on the same ideological and ethos ideas that people like Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise have been talking about over the course of the last several years.”

“The conversation that you and I were having is that it’s part and parcel to the Republican conference platform in the House right now to have anti-small-D democratic values, and it shouldn’t be striking that the person they put up for this job maybe wasn’t citing all over the January 6th report, though there is at least one mention of him in there, but instead, he’s someone who provided some of the attempted rationale for how to overturn an election,” Vitali added.

Johnson emailed fellow Republicans asking them to sign an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit by Texas seeking to invalidate the electoral college votes of four states, CNN reported in 2020. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, saying Texas lacked standing to file suit.

“I know some people might say it’s in the past, but certainly January 6th and 2020 loom so large over this building every single day, and now you have someone in the presidential line of succession who helped with that rationale in a key way that Republican members of Congress were using his legal bases that were, or course, flimsy and non-constitutional, but were trying to use them as their rationale for why they voted against certifying the election results, I think that’s extremely striking and speaks to where the party is right now,” Vitali said.

Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.