Jim Jordan

WASHINGTON - The walls of the hearing rooms and offices of the U.S. House of Representatives are filled with historic portraits of former House Speakers and committee chairs, including ex-House Speaker John Boehner of West Chester and former House Small Business committee chair Steve Chabot of Cincinnati.

Now that Champaign County’s Jim Jordan chairs the House Judiciary Committee, an official portrait of Jordan is in the works. “Unlike other portraits, which are done by well-known artists at costs ranging from $20,000 to $80,000, according to OpenSecrets, Jordan’s portrait is being painted for free by his wife, Polly.

The U.S. Capitol Historical Society, which helps Congress members raise money for their portraits, isn’t aware of any other member’s portrait in the U. S. House of Representatives collection that is painted by a spouse.

Samuel Holliday, executive vice president of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, said there are more precedents of portraits painted by the friends of the subject.

Polly and Jim Jordan have been together since he was 13 and she was 14. She home-schooled their children before becoming a public school art teacher. An oil painting she did of their family home hangs in his office, and Jordan’s financial disclosure reports show she’s made money from art sales.

Jordan said she’s doing the portrait from a photograph of him and there’s no deadline for its completion. He said chairs sometimes sit for portraits long after they leave the job.

He said having his wife do the work might “save a few dollars.”

“Hopefully she can make me not look so ugly,” he joked.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives’ historian’s office, its art collection includes more than 200 portraits of House committee chairs accumulated over more than a century. Current and former committee chairs may commission and donate their portraits. The House displays them at the discretion of the related committees.

Holliday said only portraits of Speakers and chairs of standing committees are regularly authorized, with special permission granted for paintings that mark notable firsts in congressional history. Artists must be approved by the House Fine Arts Board with input from the Curator of the House, and each portrait must meet the collection’s aesthetic guidelines.

The paintings were taxpayer-funded until 1999, when Congress decided they should be paid for with private money. In 2018, Congress passed legislation that banned taxpayer funds from being used to pay for oil paintings for the president, vice president, cabinet members, as well as Congress members.

“There’s no excuse for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on paintings of government officials,” said U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who sponsored the legislation.

The Capitol Historical Society created a way to fund them privately. It accepts tax-deductible donations designated for the artworks. Only registered lobbyists or firms employing them must disclose portrait donations. No other donations have to be disclosed.

Holliday said fundraising for the artworks is “neither managed nor controlled by the portrait honorees in compliance with congressional ethics guidelines.” Donations cover the commission, framing, shipping and insurance, along with the unveiling reception.

Disclosure records reviewed by NOTUS show corporations, unions, trade groups and lobbyists with matters pending before Congress have contributed more than $600,000 to the portrait funds of current and former lawmakers this decade.

Government watchdogs see a corruption risk. A company could help pay for the portrait of a lawmaker overseeing legislation it cares about, with no public trace. “It presents obvious opportunity for corruption and backdoor pay-to-play,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight told NOTUS.

The only recorded lobbyist donation to Jordan’s portrait fund is $5,000 from former Virginia GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who left Congress the year after Jordan took office.

Davis, who spent four years as chair of the House Committee on Government Reform, has his own portrait in the House collection. Jordan is a longtime member of that committee and became its top Republican before getting the Judiciary Committee gavel.

Davis said in an interview that former U.S. Rep. Mike Oxley, a Findlay Republican whom Jordan succeeded in the House, introduced the two men when Jordan was running for his seat. Oxley, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee, also has a portrait in the House collection.

After entering Congress, Jordan joined Davis’s committee.

“Our politics are a little bit different, but I like Jim,” said Davis, a moderate whose district included some of Washington’s wealthiest suburbs.

He said Jordan didn’t solicit his donation, and he’s donated to the portrait funds of committee chairmen in both parties because he knows “it’s a tough ask,” and he can afford to do it because his legal and lobbying practice has done well since he left Congress in 2008.

Jordan says he’s not actively raising money for the portrait fund, and any donations it gets will likely be used for materials.

Davis said he had his own fundraising staff collect the money for his portrait, which hangs in the Oversight Committee room, and that he does not know what it cost. Donors, he said, “all got invited to the portrait unveiling.” Because he represented an affluent area, he said “raising money was never a problem for me.”

Asked why the paintings matter, Davis said they help ensure that the contributions of committee chairs are remembered.

Davis pushed back on the suggestion that portrait donations are a route for influence, saying good-government groups “look behind everything for some suspicious cause.” He said his post-Congress work isn’t related to Jordan’s committee.

Davis said the lawmakers whose portraits he’s subsidized are people he has known and worked with personally.

“You can make of anything what you will,” he said.

What hangs in a committee’s rooms is up to its chairman. Davis recalled that a former Oversight chairman from Utah, Jason Chaffetz, once took down the committee’s portraits and replaced them with photographs of his home state, until a Democratic successor put them back.

Davis went the other way. The committee he inherited had been stitched together from older panels, among them the House District of Columbia committee, and Davis said he tracked down and hung a portrait of an earlier chairman of that committee from the 1940s, Illinois Republican Everett McKinley Dirksen, that was hidden in a storage room.