GOP just voted to make themselves ‘intellectual prisoners of the White House’: WSJ

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board says House Republicans have lost their policy edge and handed their thinking to the Trump White House, and it wants new Minority Leader Jim Jordan (R-OH) to change that, in an editorial titled “A GOP House of Ideas, or Hacks.”

House Republicans elected Jordan as GOP leader Tuesday, 106-73 over Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) in a secret ballot. Jordan has a reputation as a far-right bomb-thrower in public. But behind the scenes, he is respected across the party’s factions, the board notes, and built his Capitol Hill career running the Republican Study Committee from 2011 to 2013. In a letter to colleagues, he said their job can’t be merely to spotlight how radical the Democrats are.

The board argues the party’s losses stem from intellectual confusion. In recent years, it says, House Republicans have lost their policy chops, with few understanding taxes and healthcare and many aiming at snarky social media posts.

The result, in its view, is "the GOP House became intellectual prisoners of the Trump White House, which isn’t exactly the Algonquin roundtable." It says members were happy to play MAGA culture warriors, and voters could see it. It laments that members it considers more thoughtful, including Rob Wittman (R-VA), Mike Turner (R-OH), and Bryan Steil (R-WI), lost their races.

The board notes this hasn’t always been so, pointing to the supply-side tax work of the 1970s and Newt Gingrich’s reform agenda. It criticizes President Donald Trump's 2025 tax law, the "Big, Beautiful Bill," for extending tax cuts while adding carve-outs for car loans and tips that it says did nothing for growth.

The board concluded by urging Jordan to have his members build an alternative agenda, starting with healthcare, where it cites an exit poll in which 85 percent of voters were concerned about costs. "He’ll have to reward the Members who care about more than a podcast hit with Steve Bannon," said the board.