One of the first acts to which House speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry committed the Republican conference he inherited from the ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy was retaliation against prominent Democrats.
On Tuesday night, the House Administration Committee delivered the news to former speaker Nancy Pelosi that she would have to vacate her “hideaway” office in the Capitol, a small chamber conveniently located closer to where the legislative action takes place. On Wednesday morning, onetime Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer was ordered out of a similar hideaway he had occupied. Punchbowl News reporter Jake Sherman described the moves as an act of “revenge” against Democrats for voting unanimously with eight insurgent Republicans to remove McCarthy from the speakership. “Expect more of this, GOP sources tell us,” he warned.
In a statement, Pelosi objected to the maneuver as a “sharp departure from tradition” — a discordant note of dissent in the wake of the first ouster of a speaker via a motion to vacate in the country’s history. Loyal Democrats were aghast at McHenry’s “petty, vindictive, small-minded” reprisal, but why wouldn’t Democrats expect that there would be consequences for their conduct? The minority party was under no obligation to vote for a Republican to lead the chamber, of course, but nor are the majority Republicans obliged to preserve the privileges Democratic members enjoy only as a result of the GOP’s beneficence.
Democrats voted in lockstep with a faction of the conference that a majority of the majority desperately wants to punish. That’s a fraught prospect given the largely assumed influence the Right’s insurrectionary elements allegedly command among rank-and-file GOP voters, but meting out revenge against the Democrats who aided them isn’t nearly as difficult. This is what Democrats voted for.