From 'hellraiser' to House speaker: Why NC's Patrick McHenry is charged with calming the GOP chaos
A Democrat and a Republican walk into a Washington bar. But seriously.
What sounds like the setup to a joke is actually happening: Two of North Carolina’s opposing members of Congress — including the chamber’s most powerful member for the time being — are brewing a beer together.
U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry, the Charlotte-area Republican who was thrust into the spotlight last week when he was named interim speaker of the House, is teaming up with a Democratic colleague from Raleigh, U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, to make an India Pale Ale.
It’s for a contest among members of a bipartisan caucus in Congress focused on the brewing industry, and is coming together at Wicked Weed in Asheville, the East Coast beer Mecca that McHenry used to represent in a past iteration of the state’s congressional maps.
It’s a rare moment of levity in the otherwise rancorous and cantankerous world of national politics. “We have a very cordial relationship,” Ross said of McHenry. “But beer has been a lot more fun.”
But the forthcoming battle of the beers will be overshadowed by a different contest involving McHenry starting this week: The election of a new House speaker.
McHenry now leads the chamber following an intraparty rift that sparked the extraordinary ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Divisions in the GOP persist, in part because the party’s narrow House majority gives outsize influence to those on the far right, and McHenry will be tasked with finding consensus on a new House leader.
One of McHenry’s fellow GOP politicians and a longtime friend, state Rep. Jason Saine, summed up the tough job McHenry now faces.
“I immediately texted him, ‘Man, who did you [tick] off to get this?’” Saine said. “He replied, like, 'I know, right?' I said, ‘You’re the right man for the right time.’”
While others are considered favorites to be the next permanent speaker, McHenry himself may have support if he pursues a long-shot bid. He has yet to announce his plans. Ross said she hasn’t talked to McHenry about his plans, but she doesn’t think he’ll run for speaker — unless perhaps the current Republican front-runners are all unable to win enough votes.
“He might be a consensus candidate after several rounds,” Ross said. “I don’t know. But for now he’s out of the fray.”
While Republicans in Washington sit stewing, McHenry’s and Ross’ beer sits brewing — a glimmer of bipartisanship in a deeply divided chamber.
McHenry turned down an interview request; a spokesman said he didn’t want to be distracted from the upcoming speaker election. But Ross said their beer is a sign of how lawmakers can work together, noting that she and McHenry aren’t just brewing an IPA together.
For instance, in the early stages of the pandemic they worked together to help extend the filing deadline for taxpayers who were having difficulty filing returns on time due in part to accounting complexities related to new federal relief funds.
“We've always gotten along personally, even if we didn't agree on policy,” she said.
His partnership with Ross, and interviews with other lawmakers, paint a more complex picture of the man the nation saw last week, the one whose first acts as speaker included kicking former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi out of her spacious office in the Capitol, a perk that other former speakers have enjoyed. Democrats saw it as petty, but the move tickled Republicans.
While McHenry is now the face of a chamber that has become more conservative in recent years, the 10-term veteran of Congress — who grew up in Gastonia and represents a district northwest of Charlotte — has evolved from a self-described “hellraiser” into an establishment Republican who Democrats have sometimes worked with in the past.
“He's been someone that I think is well respected by members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, which is why Kevin McCarthy appointed him to be the interim speaker while we figure out the next steps here.” said U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel, the Triangle-area Democrat who serves with McHenry on the House Financial Services Committee.
'The room where the decisions are made'
Although McHenry is in power now due to his loyalty to McCarthy, he entered Congress two decades ago as a 29-year-old whose political attitude was more in line with the far-right incendiaries who just ended McCarthy’s speakership.
McCarthy’s historic ouster came as he was attempting to balance appeasing the far-right wing of the GOP — including by launching an impeachment inquiry into Democratic President Joe Biden, which has even fellow conservatives questioning the existence of any evidence — while also seeking to position the Republican Party to win competitive districts next year, in hopes of holding onto power after the 2024 elections.
McHenry was one of McCarthy’s closest allies, helping him win the speaker’s contest in January and negotiate the debt limit deal that McCarthy made with Biden earlier this year. He helped McCarthy keep his fragile majority together — until it came apart following the decision in late September to work with Democrats to keep the federal government open, rather than cause a shutdown.
How’d he get there? A change in temperament, McHenry has said in past interviews. He reigned in his more fiery impulses and worked with the system rather than against it. He made the conscious choice to abandon his antagonistic political approach and instead work his way up the chain of leadership over the last 19 years.
“I went to the U.S. House and was a hellraiser,” McHenry said in a 2015 interview with the conservative Carolina Journal. “I mean I was someone who wanted to shake things up quickly. And I realized that in order to affect outcomes, I had to take a different tact. … My concerted effort was to be in the room where the decisions are made.”
In 2017 McHenry was made chief deputy whip, tasked with getting votes in the House for the legislative priorities of newly elected President Donald Trump, to help Trump secure some early wins.
Whipping votes requires someone respected by fellow members of Congress, as it often involves a delicate mix of carrot-and-stick dealmaking. McHenry appears to have handled it well. That same year, former House Speaker John Boehner told Politico that McHenry would one day follow in his footsteps and become speaker.
So when McHenry became speaker Tuesday, that prediction came true — albeit just temporarily, at least for now.
It was a stark turnaround from his “hellraiser” days when he first got to Congress. That attitude started in 2003 during his single term as a state legislator, in the North Carolina House. The 120-seat state House was tied 60-60 that year, and Republican Rep. Richard Morgan made a deal with Democratic House Speaker Jim Black to serve as co-speakers.
Some conservatives were upset at the power-sharing arrangement. Republican kingmaker Art Pope funded attack ads against Morgan because of it, WRAL previously reported. Inside the legislature, McHenry spoke out against Morgan as a fellow Republican.
Unlike the anti-McCarthy conservatives 20 years later, McHenry and his fellow dissidents failed back in 2003. Morgan retaliated, taking away the assistants assigned to McHenry and seven other conservative critics, the Fayetteville Observer reported in Morgan’s 2018 obituary. That would’ve forced them to schedule their own meetings, take their own calls and otherwise made it harder for them to be productive.
McHenry quickly left the legislature, running for Congress instead. And although he later decided to adopt a less confrontational style, he’s by no means a moderate, especially on the fiscal issues that historically have been the bread-and-butter of suburban Republicans like him.
'A speaker who works with us'
McHenry helped deliver wins in Congress for Trump, like a massive corporate tax cut as well as a vote to repeal Obamacare in 2017 that passed the House under McHenry’s watch, before failing in the Senate.
Yet McHenry was also the only Republican in North Carolina’s U.S. House delegation who didn’t vote on Jan. 6, 2021, to help Trump try overturning the results of the 2020 election. That’s unlikely to win him support among his fellow Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy. Nor is his work, as reported by the New York Times, helping McCarthy strike a deal with Democrats late last month to avoid the government shutdown that far-right Republicans had been pushing for.
So if he does attempt a run for permanent speaker, it’s unclear if he could win unanimous Republican support. But could he win Ross’ vote? What about other Democrats?
“He is someone that we can work with and I think he cares about the institution,” Ross said.
Ross said Democrats would be open to potentially voting for a Republican speaker — which would help protect that speaker from repeating McCarthy’s fate, tanked by the GOP’s far-right flank. But Democrats aren’t going to do that just to be friendly. This is politics, after all.
“Democrats are interested in having a speaker who works with us,” Ross said. “And so that could be a Republican, if the circumstances were right and the terms were right.”
And here, the beer Ross and McHenry are brewing perhaps reflects their broader approach to politics.
It’s an IPA, a bitter and high-alcohol brew popular among the craft beer crowd. Ross is more of a light beer fan. However, she said, she was willing to compromise and put her personal tastes aside — if it means they have a better shot at coming out on top.
“We plan to win,” she said.
