If you know their names and faces, they’re probably not all that important – so says outgoing congressman Patrick McHenry, who tells Politico in an “exit interview” that his House GOP colleagues most prominently featured on TV and social media are the least powerful internally – “almost to a person.”
McHenry, who has served North Carolina since 2005, came in as a 29-year-old firebrand conservative and exits two decades later as a “paragon of pragmatism,” in Politico’s terms. In a lengthy interview, the site asked McHenry what has changed about his GOP colleagues in the House in that time.
“It’s the dynamic of, you’re leaving the concert, and everyone’s trying to go out one door, and you’re trying to go out the other door,” McHenry began. “You’re going upstream from the traffic. That’s what it feels like.”
He explained that during his first and second terms, “some people never pivoted away from that, because they thought, ‘That’s how you’re effective.’ And you’re spending your time on the outside rather than anything internal.”
McHenry didn’t name names, but anyone who follows politics would easily be able to crack off a small handful of Republican House members – Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace – while perhaps being more hard-pressed to come up with others.
“The people that are outside of positions of authority in the House — they’re the most frequent guests on media, your most ample quotes and most active online — are not meaningful players internally, almost to a person, in this institution,” he said. “The rewards, the incentives, have shifted in my 20 years to attention and people assuming that this place is a platform for that attention.”
McHenry, not a major media figure himself in recent years, set aside the brawling ways of his first couple of terms and “decided to get serious.” His new focus led to the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee and a three-week turn as Speaker of the House.
McHenry announced in December 2023 that he would not seek re-election and would retire at the end of his current term.
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