A more complimentary thing could hardly be said in MAGA circles bent on disruption and status quo bashing than what former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said about new House Speaker Patrick McHenry (R-NC)’s first order of business as Speaker. McHenry departs sharply from “tradition,” Pelosi says, referencing the new Speaker’s swift move to boot Pelosi from her Capitol office space. (To some on the far-right, departing from tradition sounds a lot like draining the swamp.)
Upon assuming his new position, McHenry’s team immediately ordered that Pelosi’s office space be scaled back, reclaiming some of the square footage reserved for the Speaker’s office in the Capitol. Echoes of January 6 Capitol insurgents who also tried — albeit with less official protocol — to reclaim Pelosi’s office were clear in McHenry’s move and in the optics of its first-order-of-business timing. Evicting Pelosi scores points with the base, by any metric.
Nancy Pelosi's Office Occupied by Pro-Trump Rioters amid Chaos at U.S. Capitol https://t.co/bPgQZz3YO6
— People (@people) January 6, 2021
Pelosi responded that the “office space doesn’t matter to me,” but also noted how McHenry’s act differed from her own actions upon being handed the gavel, which included allotting generous space for outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert.
Pelosi said in a statement about McHenry’s move:
“This eviction is a sharp departure from tradition. As Speaker, I gave former Speaker Hastert a significantly larger suite of offices for as long as he wished. Office space doesn’t matter to me, but it seems to be important to them.”
[Pelosi’s response may have been playing the optics game too, with its mention of Hastert, whose unflattering Wikipedia entry begins: “John Dennis Hastert is a former American politician, former educator, convicted felon and sex offender who represented Illinois’s 14th congressional district from 1987 to 2007 and served as the 51st Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007.”]
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