No. of Recommendations: 3
That was a very long post, and raises a lot of interesting points - but I'll respond to two of your questions succinctly:
When forced to act in public, only 20 Republicans had the courage to vote their conviction. In private, there were actually 122 who felt he had no business holding the job. Why?
Tactics. On both sides.
There were at least 50+ Republicans who actually opposed his nomination, but most of them were deliberately voting "yes" in the early rounds. They coordinated that response so that there would be at least a few that could flip with each successive round of voting. That way Jordan would always be losing votes with every round of voting he called, even if he managed to flip a few other holdouts.
There were probably far fewer than 122 who felt he had no business holding the job. Some - perhaps many - of those who voted against him in the secret ballot would have tolerated Jordan as Speaker, but knew he had no chance of getting 217. So they wanted to rip the band-aid off.
If none of these options are appealing, why are these mythical moderate Republican not responding by hitting the eject button? By doing the right thing over the remaining months of the term, accepting a primary defeat or general election defeat in 2024 and walking away on January 1, 2025?
Because they're more aligned with the GOP than the Democrats. They might detest some of the individuals who now hold power in the party. Trump is intensely polarizing, and many centrists (especially foreign policy and budget hawks) despise some of his policies. But generally speaking, they believe that the GOP broadly is better than the Democrats. Compared to Democrats, they're more conservative on a host of social issues (guns, gay and trans rights, abortion, etc.), as well as on many matters of fiscal policy. On the whole, they believe that the country is better off if Republicans are in charge than Democrats. They probably don't think most of the people putting their names forward into contention for the Speakership are extremist. They might detest Jim Jordan's tactics in pursuing the Speakership, and they might disagree with some of his positions (or how far he takes those positions) - but even a moderate Republican is going to be closer to any of the nine candidates than they are with even the center of the Democratic party.
They're not going to turn into Democrats or abstain from politics just because of the personal failings of Donald Trump.
