One of Patrick McHenry’s first acts in the temporary position of speaker pro tempore — after his theatrical gavel slam — was to remove the belongings of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker emerita, from her honorary “hideaway” office at the U.S. Capitol.
Pelosi, House speaker from 2007 to 2011 and 2019 to 2023, was reportedly at home in San Francisco to attend the funeral of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died last Thursday.
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Congressional hideaways, explained Roll Call, are unlisted offices, located for convenience near the House and Senate chambers and reserved for the use of select members.
Pelosi, in a carefully worded statement, characterized McHenry’s move as “a sharp departure from tradition”:
Critics of the action ordered by the newly installed speaker pro tem, a close ally of the ousted speaker, Kevin McCarthy, showed less restraint in their criticism:
It was reported that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s staff had assisted the Pelosi team in vacating the honorary office near the House floor.
Pelosi, recall, moved out of the official speaker’s office expeditiously enough following Democrats’ narrow loss of the House majority in November that McCarthy had moved his personal effects in before securing the speaker’s gavel, which it ultimately took him 15 votes and much intraparty deal-making to do.
Interim Republican leadership also removed Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, from his hideaway office, according to a report early Wednesday.
A GOP koan was beginning to emerge early Wednesday depicting House Democrats as having abandoned McCarthy — who made no bipartisan overture, some Democrats reported, while simultaneously sprinting to the cameras to deflect shutdown blame across the aisle — and thus made themselves at least as worthy of retaliation as the Republican hardliners who’d launched the intraparty revolt in the first place.
Charlie Dent, a Republican who represented an eastern Pennsylvania district in the House from 2005 to 2018, said in an MSNBC interview that the episode served as evidence that McCarthy, all along, should have been crafting deals with willing Democrats rather than seeking to mollify his party’s “nihilist faction” by, among other concessions, putting members of the latter coalition on the House’s powerful rules and appropriations panels.
Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s assistant Democrat leader, said in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday that he had opted against occupying a hideaway in anticipation that vengeance might be in the offing.
“Expect more of this,” Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News quoted an unnamed Republican source as having said.
The Associated Press contributed.
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