Jim Jordan has sailed past his expiration date

House Republican Jim Jordan has always been a slimeball, a liar, and every other negative thing you can think of. But he also used to be something else in his role as House Judiciary Committee Chair: effective. Somewhere along the way Jordan lost that entirely, and it’s enough to make you wonder what happened.

The last time Jim Jordan was House Judiciary Committee Chair several years ago, he routinely held bogus public hearings about fake scandals in an effort to change minds. The hearings were a joke to those who were fully versed in the subject matter. But those hearings did their job of getting Republican lies into the media sphere so dummies out there would fall for them. If Jordan’s goal back then was to make moderate would-be Democratic voters skittish about voting for Democratic candidates, it worked.

But in the nearly three months since Jim Jordan regained his House Judiciary Committee Chair position, the hearings he’s held have been remarkably ineffective. In fact they’ve been so ineffective that even many of you, who follow politics daily, weren’t aware that Jordan has even been holding hearings.

Jordan’s antics just aren’t penetrating anymore. They don’t even seem to be helping to rally the folks on his own side. The hearings are so lame, even right wing propaganda outlets seem hesitant to acknowledge their existence. And now that Jordan has decided to start poking at Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg in an ineffective attempt at running interference for Trump, it’s been so ineffective that Jordan has had to keep ramping up his antics just to get any attention out of it – to the point that Bragg is taking legal action against him. Through all this, Jordan still hasn’t managed to move the needle for Trump one bit.

One might be tempted to conclude that the reason Jim Jordan has lost his evil mojo is that he’s lost his longtime sidekick. After all, back in the day, it was Jordan and then-Congressman Mark Meadows who were tag teaming their bogus hearings. So was Meadows the brains of the operation back then? If so, he seems to have lost his mojo as well. Last we checked, Meadows went down such a stupid path, he’s now either a criminal target of the DOJ or he’s turned state’s evidence in the case.

And perhaps that’s the common thread. Jordan and Meadows have both lost gradually their effectiveness ever since Donald Trump came onto the scene. Even with Trump now being gone from the scene, reduced to little more than a ghost figure who haunts the Republican Party, Jordan still feels compelled to tailor his hearings to what Trump’s base would want to hear. Or more specifically, what Trump himself would want to hear. So has every other House Republican committee chair this year.

So you’ve got the entire Republican House holding public hearings for the sole purpose of keeping one has-been happy. It’s all about putting on precisely the show that Donald Trump wants to see from his couch, in the hope that Trump will be gracious enough not to take these House Republicans down with him when he’s hauled off to prison and begins deciding which Republicans to blame for his own downfall.

It doesn’t matter that these Republican House hearings are so tepidly ineffective as to not even get any attention, let alone negative attention. Every Republican committee chair has to go along with this same ineffective idiocy, just to keep Trump happy in his final days as a free man. Jim Jordan, who used to be pretty effective at coming up with bogus public hearings aimed at poisoning voters’ minds, has become just as ineffective as any other Trump sycophant. It’s enough to make you wonder if they’ll ever be able to shake Trump’s ghost, even after he’s long gone.