If you’ve been watching the impeachment hearings and—heaven help you—the statements House Republicans have made to the press around the hearings, there’s a number that keeps coming up that shows how brazenly dishonest Republicans are willing to be. And Rep. Jim Jordan is a particular standout.

And no, the number is not 177, the number of Ohio State University wrestlers found by an independent investigation to have been sexually abused by team doctor Richard Strauss. It’s not two, which is the number of people who say they told Jordan directly and in person about the abuse.

The number is 63 million.

As in Jordan’s claim that “Democrats never got over the fact that this new guy who’s never been in this town, never been in politics, this new guy is shaking this place up and that drives them crazy. They’ve never accepted the will of 63 million Americans, they never accepted the fact that Donald Trump won an Electoral College landslide.”

Donald Trump got nearly 63 million votes. Jordan is insisting that the will of those 63 million voters is more important than the will of the nearly 66 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton. Which, yeah, that’s the way the Electoral College works and that’s why Trump is in the White House, but it takes a special kind of nerve to act like it’s an offense against democracy to practice oversight on a president because of the number of people who voted for him when that is millions smaller than the number of people who voted against him. (Not to mention that it wasn’t an Electoral College landslide, historically speaking.)

Again: the Electoral College is the Electoral College. But 65,844,610 is still bigger than 62,979,636, and Jordan is bragging about the latter number as if it confers some kind of special, untouchable, beyond-the-reach of the rule of law status on Trump.

Shameless.

Published with permission from Daily Kos.