Steve Scalise

House Republicans are responding to the resounding rebuke of their party by launching headlong into a leadership contest where neither candidate appears willing to break with the person congressional Republicans most blame for the sweeping midterm losses: President Donald Trump. Both Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise are known to their colleagues as close Trump allies, and neither indicated they intend to put any daylight into their relationships with the president in their initial statements declaring their intention to run for minority leader. Jordan, the longtime conservative brawler and sitting Judiciary chair, pledged to push back on Democratic excesses including “investigating every facet of the Administration and private entities across the country.” Scalise, the current majority leader and a fixture of GOP leadership for more than a decade, also raised the prospect of pushing back against Democratic investigations and a possible Trump impeachment while telling colleagues that the president needed a “tested negotiator working alongside him to secure administration priorities.” Those pledges to fight Democrats on Trump’s behalf came at the same time that other members were musing both publicly and privately about the president’s rapidly waning influence — and the imperative for lawmakers to start taking steps to craft a political future without him in it. “Let’s start being a separate branch of government,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring at the end of the year, said in a text message about the election. “We’re not an appendage of the White House.” Few House Republicans expect Scalise or Jordan to publicly break with Trump, which would be wildly out of character for either of them. Scalise traveled with the president during the final days of the midterm campaign season, and Jordan rose from a hard-right rabble-rouser to a cable-news fixture in part by embracing Trump. Trump, for his part, said Wednesday he’s not planning to weigh in on the upcoming GOP leadership race that erupted immediately after Speaker Mike Johnson announced he would step aside as top House Republican in the next Congress. “We’ll stay out of it,” Trump said. “All good people. I guess right now you have two candidates, right?” Candidates in other House GOP leadership races similarly did not mention the need for the party to chart an independent course, but most stressed party unity and prioritizing members’ nuts-and-bolts concerns. Members, meanwhile, spent Wednesday talking privately among themselves about the historic electoral wipeout — which could see Democrats win 260 seats, more than they’ve had since the early 1990s — and Trump’s role in bringing it about. Trump responded to the loss by arguing Republicans simply do not vote if he is not on the ballot — cold comfort for lawmakers who will never appear on a ballot with Trump again. A House Republican, one of several granted anonymity to speak candidly about the president and the upcoming leadership race, predic