'Terrible situation': Conservative congressman laments chaos plaguing GOP House majority

01 January

This Friday, January 3, 2025 will mark the end of House Financial Services Committee Patrick McHenry's (R-North Carolina) work in Congress.

The Gen-X Republican, now 49, was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004. But in 2024, McHenry decided not to seek reelection.

In a late December interview with Politico reporters Eleanor Mueller and Zachary Warmbrodt, the conservative outgoing congressman looked back on his 20 years in the House and spoke candidly about the chaos that has been plaguing the GOP's House majority.

When McHenry first entered the House in January 2005 during the George W. Bush years, he was known for being a combative firebrand. But along the way, Mueller and Warmbrodt note, he came to be considered a "pragmatist."

McHenry recalled, "You can either be on all the shows and in all the floor fights, or you can actually be in the right rooms where the decisions are made. So my first two terms were a learning experience about how the institution worked — touching the hot burner, right? In my second term, I discovered that I wasn't being effective, that this was not moving my colleagues to vote with me. It was not building capacity internally. It was not helping me move legislation."

Since then, McHenry observes, the House has become increasingly chaotic — and that chaos was evident when former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was ousted as speaker.

McHenry told Politico, "It's like an out-of-body experience looking back at that now, because it was pure anger. It was a terrible situation…. Diminishing the role of the speaker, the motion to vacate — that has been fully weaponized. It's been fully weaponized by people that are quite selfish in their views, that are not institutionalists and don’t actually get more conservative policy as a result of it. And history will show that."

Politico's full interview with Patrick McHenry is available at this link.

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