North Carolina representatives played a range of roles in the short tenure of Kevin McCarthy as U.S. House speaker. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says one in particular is fighting a partisan tide.
The brief and wild reign of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House had North Carolina all over it.
You might remember back in January, when the House had an all-night battle royal over picking McCarthy as speaker to begin with. It took 15 ballots before he was elected. At one point, McCarthy ally Mike Rogers of Alabama lunged at McCarthy critic Matt Gaetz of Florida. The GOP-on-GOP crime was averted by North Carolina’s own Richard Hudson, who put Rogers in a rear chinlock until the honorable representative from Alabama calmed down.
But Hudson played a minor part in this saga. Two other North Carolinians had bigger roles.
Back in May, Rep. Dan Bishop, whose 8th District includes Monroe and Salisbury, became the first Republican in Congress to publicly support getting rid of McCarthy as speaker. Bishop spent months feeding the chaos that led to last week’s vote to oust McCarthy. But when the time came to back up his talk, Bishop voted not to get rid of McCarthy.
Bishop says it's partly because he thought the loss of McCarthy would cause trouble, but also because he's running for North Carolina attorney general and is basically washing his hands of House business. A less charitable view might be that Bishop made a political calculation. If the next speaker is a disaster, Bishop can say he voted for the status quo. If the next speaker turns out fine, Bishop can say he agitated to get rid of McCarthy all along. If it comes up in a later campaign, he can argue whichever side suits him. A classic fork of the tongue.
Now that McCarthy is gone, the interim speaker of the House is Patrick McHenry, the bow-tied rep who grew up in Gastonia. He serves the 10th District, which swings from Shelby up through Hickory and over to Statesville. McHenry is a strange case for a 21st-century politician in that he seems to have tacked more to the center than the edge.
When he was first elected to the House back in 2005, he was described as a "bomb-thrower." But eventually, he decided that throwing bombs wasn’t doing him or anybody else any good. So he decided to focus on learning policy and trying to get things done. As a former roommate told Politico, McHenry committed to “become a serious conservative without being a jerk.”
The results? I’d say a mixed bag. He supported Donald Trump’s presidency, but voted against Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He has gained respect from Democrats for bipartisan legislation. He was in the middle of that scrum between Mike Rogers and Matt Gaetz, trying to keep the peace. And it turned out that he was first on McCarthy’s secret list of potential replacements — a list created by a law enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
McHenry was so angry that the House got rid of McCarthy that he slammed down his gavel at the end of the session. But the underlying part of that is, it’s his gavel now, at least temporarily. He decided it was better to build than destroy. A lot of his colleagues could learn from that.
Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
