Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who had just been named speaker pro tempore following his friend Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) being ousted as speaker of the House, aggressively slammed the gavel as he sent the House to recess.
The gavel slam sent shock waves through the chamber and America as it marked, for the first time in the country’s history, a speaker being ousted and a temporary replacement being put in place.
KARL ROVE BELIEVES DESANTIS NEEDS STRONG PERFORMANCE IN IOWA: 'DO OR DIE'
It represented pure anger and a wave of emotions coming out for the world to see.
“Kevin's a friend, and to see him lose the speakership after the work and the effort he put into helping build the majority, the successes that we had this year, it was emotional,” McHenry told the Washington Examiner in an in-depth interview about his time as speaker pro tempore.
Day of ouster
The House Financial Services Committee chairman had prepared to be speaker pro tempore for the two weeks leading up to the motion to vacate when he was informed that he would replace McCarthy should he get ousted.
By the time the motion to vacate came up and McCarthy was ousted, it was no surprise to anyone close to the former speaker. They knew the motion to vacate would pass “solidly,” McHenry said.
And they had prepared for the exact moment.
McHenry had two briefings, one on Monday, the day before, and one on Tuesday, the morning of, on what he was supposed to say when he ascended to the position and what his life would look like as speaker pro tempore. So all that was “ready to go,” as McHenry said. But still, the emotion of the moment overwhelmed him leading up to the gavel slam.
“I knew the script, I knew it was gonna happen, I knew moment by moment what was going to happen. That was all baked in,” he said. “What I didn't recognize was the emotion of the moment, and that's what came out — just the emotion and a level of anger about the position that we would be in.”
He also wasn’t prepared to be doing the job for three weeks.
When McHenry woke up on the day McCarthy was set to be ousted, it started like every other morning. He and his wife worked to get the children to school, and then both went on their way to work.
“It felt slow-moving,” McHenry said. “We know what was going to happen, and everything slowed down.”
One thing he didn’t know was the amount of time it would take for House Republicans to elect a speaker. Going into it, and even after he assumed the position, he assumed it would only be for “a short period of time.”
When he found out he would be speaker pro tempore if McCarthy were ousted, McHenry started doing light research about what exactly his powers would be, and then, as it became more clear that the motion to vacate was something that was going to happen, he started doing more intensive research about how he would serve in that role.
Nobody, McHenry included, was up to speed about the parliamentary procedures, the rules, or even how the process would work. And with no precedent for how a speaker pro tempore is supposed to operate post-9/11, how much power he could wield was ultimately up to him.
“The book of precedent for this position, there's nothing, nothing at all. And so everything we're doing is setting a precedent, which is weighty in this institution since we've been around for 200 years,” McHenry said with a laugh. “You know, something crazy has happened at some point that could guide you, and there was nothing to guide us.”
But the logistics of the role were tough, especially because, in his mind, this would only be a temporary position he would fill for a couple of days.
The most jarring part for him was the read-in he received on security and the realization that for however long this speaker race took, he wouldn’t be alone. He would have 24/7 security, the most significant security of any member of Congress and second only to the president and vice president.
“That was the thing I didn't contemplate when I said yes,” McHenry said. “Because this is a temporary role, you think you can move through this very quickly, and it will take a couple of days, which was my expectation.”
Electing the speaker
When the race for speaker started, McHenry warned his colleagues about going too fast, saying he wanted “members to have enough time to process what happened and then be thoughtful for the next step," especially after the “rough” conference meeting where McCarthy informed his colleagues that he wouldn’t be running for speaker again.
“Had we stuck around, I think it would have done a massive disservice to House Republicans,” McHenry said.
So, he sent members home for the remainder of the week.
They came back a day early the next week to start trying to elect their next speaker. It was between House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).
McHenry went into the week expecting there would be a speaker come Friday. But he didn’t anticipate two things that would play into the conference not being able to coalesce around a nominee: No. 1 was how close the election was between Jordan and Scalise, and No. 2 was “Jordan’s disposition about Scalise’s nomination afterward,” McHenry said, echoing the sentiment from other members who felt Jordan didn't do enough to support Scalise.
And while he wasn’t shocked that some people were unhappy with Scalise’s nomination, it was something he thought could be remedied.
That’s why he was surprised that Thursday night when he discovered Scalise was dropping out of the race.
That day, there was an expectation that Scalise was going to work throughout the night to try and garner more support. Relieved that he was going to be able to go home before 5 p.m., McHenry let his staff go home, and he left the Capitol to take his daughter to a dance class and go grocery shopping. But after leaving the store, he got a call from House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) informing him that Scalise wanted to hold a conference meeting in 30 minutes.
He was dropping out.
Scalise realized he didn’t have the votes and that it was unlikely he would ever get there, so without taking it to the floor, he dropped out. Leaving the conference back at square one.
“We had to go start over in the whole process, which resulted in Jordan, in a more excruciating, longer process, coming to the same conclusion Scalise did,” McHenry said.
Jordan didn’t immediately announce he was running, but everyone knew it was inevitable the Ohio Republican would be the nominee. However, securing the votes to become speaker on the floor proved to be an impossible task.
As speaker pro tempore, McHenry wanted to be “as fair to Jordan” as he was to Scalise in “letting them have their time to go put the vote coalition together to become speaker,” no matter how difficult it might be.
“The twists and turns of that week were like none other. That was painful in so many ways,” he said of Jordan's attempt at becoming speaker.
The day before the first ballot would be held on the floor, it became clear that the opposition was there and Jordan wasn’t going to have the votes necessary to become speaker on at least the first ballot, and contrary to McHenry’s advice, he was adamant about bringing a vote to the floor.
“I advised him of the risk, and I advised the conference that whenever we go to the House floor without a majority for our position, we risk handing this over, and I made that very clear to the conference,” he said.
But Jordan went to the floor anyway, putting McHenry in a complicated spot.
Jordan’s decision to keep bringing up a floor vote on his speakership, even though there was no path to 217, didn’t help the conference in “building consensus” toward an end goal of electing a speaker, McHenry said, but it was his decision to make.
“The willingness to go to the floor on the vote series, knowing that he had opposition that was not going to be reconciled to him in any terms, I don't think served the conference well,” McHenry said of Jordan.
In McHenry’s eyes, he had only two roles as speaker pro tempore: One was to serve the conference, and the second was to serve the conference nominee.
However, when Jordan kept bringing the speaker’s vote to the floor, it resulted in a conflict for McHenry when it came to those two roles. And with those two things in conflict, the decision for him was clear: “I have to serve the conference,” he said.
But serving the conference had its own challenges.
Once Scalise dropped out, there was pressure from a handful of members for the House to vote on a resolution to expand McHenry's powers to allow the House to continue to operate.
But at the time, McHenry “was quite closed” to the idea of expanding his powers and thought the conference needed more time to figure everything out.
After the second full week of no speaker, McHenry became “more open” to the idea of a resolution to empower him to lead the House if that’s what the conference wanted — which the majority did not want as they shot down the idea in one of their many conference meetings. But apart from any sort of resolution, it was McHenry’s belief that the only power he had as speaker pro tempore was to lead the House in the election of a speaker.
That conviction was sharpened after his second meeting as speaker pro tempore with the House parliamentarian.
“Nothing else served the institution, and nothing else conformed with the Constitution,” McHenry said of his belief in the limits of the role. “Therefore, the hard thing had to be the hard thing, which was electing a speaker. And once I established that, it took a while for members to understand that I was not interested.”
This belief didn’t just run contrary to some of his colleagues' ideas about the role. It also ran contrary to McCarthy’s, who fully believed that McHenry had the same power as any regular speaker would.
McCarthy was adamant throughout the process that McHenry had the full power of a speaker.
"I always believed the names I was putting on the list could carry out and keep government running until you elect a new speaker," McCarthy said at the time.
Regardless of their differing opinions on his power, McHenry and McCarthy's relationship never faltered. Their roles had merely switched.
“He’s listened to me for years about his decision-making, so he flipped the table on me and flipped the relationship on me and gave me real feedback, strong feedback,” McHenry said of his and McCarthy’s diverging opinions on this. “You rely on trusted confidants to give you advice and guidance and feedback, and you got to be open enough to not be judgmental about that.”
The pressure
There was all the pressure in the world on McHenry. He had unexpectedly found himself leading the House, everyone in the conference expected something of him, and on top of the internal pressures, the country was looking at him and scrutinizing his every move.
In addition, he had taken over at a moment when there was a war raging in the Middle East as Israel had been invaded, Ukraine was still defending itself from Russia, and President Joe Biden had requested a supplemental spending bill that many felt needed to move as soon as possible.
To get through it all, he relied on those closest to him, such as Reps. Richard Hudson (R-NC) and French Hill (R-AR), and he was the “most grateful” for his relationship with Stefanik because “she was the key to running all the operations for the elections, and she and her team handled that so well,” he said.
“The stress, the weight of the decision-making and how it has broader impacts — that was the hardest part,” he said. “So that weight puts pressure on you to try to think clearly, and everything about the job is counter to thinking clearly. The flow of information, the pressure from every member of the House on any given day. It's a heavy position.”
When all was said and done, McHenry would not have his powers expanded. The House would be deadlocked for three weeks, shooting down three other speaker candidates until it elected the conference’s “fifth choice” for speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), after McCarthy was ousted and Scalise, Jordan, and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) failed to get the votes.
Despite the chaos and the insanity of the three speakerless weeks, McHenry never lost faith in the institution despite the fact that “on any given day it can be a complete failure,” as it was a number of times over the three-week period, but “over longer periods of time gets it right.”
“Just like water finds its level, this institution finds a majority, and absent external forces, it will do that,” he said. “I'm not down on the institution. I'm not down on our ability to make decisions, but we've been in a particularly dumb chapter. But after a dumb chapter, [we] usually have a pretty good one.”
As the interview was wrapping up, McHenry reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. On it was a meme that showed a graph.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
On one axis of the graph was the term “f*** around.” On the other axis, it was “find out.” The dot on the graph was at seven on both axes.
This was a representation of how Congress got to this point, how the messy actions of House members led to the consequences of chaos.