Sixth District Republican Congressman Ben Cline briefly turned on the majority of his own party for a few hours last week after Jim Jordan was deposed as the House Speaker nominee.
But then, being Ben Cline, he retreated back to his default position: back bench equivocation.
But first …
“The Swamp has struck back,” Cline tweeted in a post that he has since deleted, but, Ben, you have to know, you can’t just hit delete and expect something to go away forever.
In this case, Gene Zitver, the author of ClineWatch, was the one to screenshot the Cline screed, which blasted the vote by House Republicans on Friday to move on from fellow Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Jim Jordan as the party’s nominee for House Speaker.
Cline, in the now-deleted post, blasted the “secret ballot vote” to remove Jordan as a “shocking display of cowardice.”
“I strongly opposed this effort and voted to retain Jim as our candidate for Speaker,” Cline wrote, again, in a post that he has since deleted.
In a Twitter post from Saturday that is still live as of this writing, Cline doubled down on how Jordan “would have made an outstanding Speaker,” so, it would seem that the reason Cline tried to erase from history the Friday tweet isn’t that he had any shame over casting his lot with a fellow election denier.
No, the issue appears to be casting the majority of his party as “The Swamp.”
Cline, politically androgynous as ever, is reading the tea leaves here.
The moderates in his party, in rejecting Jordan, indicated that they’re maybe finally ready to drag the GOP back in the general direction of the center-right.
Cline has been on the fence about going full-out MAGA for a while now.
The deleted post signals that he doesn’t want to be relegated to having to bang the gavel on the House New Post Office Names Subcommittee when the Speaker mess is all said and done for.
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Chris Graham
