Kean won’t talk about Jordan votes

Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) has now voted for Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House twice – and he’s not talking about it.

Asked in the hallways of the Capitol about the speaker vote, Kean said nothing. The congressman has also not directly said anything via official statements about his support for Jordan, who lost a second speaker ballot earlier today and is now strategizing about how to proceed.

The one thing Kean has said, in a mostly unrelated video posted to social media yesterday, is that “it’s important to get Congress working again and govern, so we can address the major issues in New Jersey and around the globe.”

The two speaker votes were politically complicated ones for Kean, who represents a highly competitive district in the New Jersey suburbs. Jordan has long been known as a right-wing rabble-rouser in the House, and Kean’s Democratic opponents are already trying to tie Kean to Jordan’s views on abortion and the 2020 presidential election.

Kean’s video from yesterday implies that he cast the votes he did because while he may personally be less conservative than Jordan, he believes that the House GOP caucus should stay unified, elect a speaker, and move on with House business. 

That would be similar to what Kean’s two fellow New Jersey Republicans, Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) and Chris Smith (R-Manchester), have said of their own speaker votes. Both voted for Jordan on the House floor and have argued the House Republicans should stick together, even though Smith was a supporter of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) during the original GOP nomination process. (Van Drew has been a Jordan supporter from the beginning.)

Kean may well believe in the same Republican unity as his New Jersey colleagues. But it’s tough to say anything more definitive, because Kean himself isn’t saying much.