McCarthy, busy adjusting to life after the speakership, Eyes leaves Congress

At an emotional evening press conference immediately after he was ousted as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Kevin McCarthy gave an unclear answer about whether he would remain in Congress.

“I’ll look into that,” he said then.

Over the past two months, Mr. McCarthy has examined the life of a rank-and-file member and found it to be a painful one after more than a decade at the top of his party in the House of Representatives.

These days, Mr. McCarthy, famous for his preternaturally sunny disposition in California, is hard to cheer up. He no longer attends the conference meetings he chaired and has at times struggled to contain his anger at the Republicans who ousted him. (He denied the accusation by one of them, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, that he elbowed him in the kidney in a Capitol basement hallway.)

He is also struggling to make peace with the idea that it is time to go, even as California’s Dec. 8 re-election deadline approaches and his colleagues expect him to leave.

“When you spend 20 years building something, it’s hard to end that chapter,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, one of McCarthy’s closest friends in Congress. “His life has been about building the Republican majority and reaching the third highest office in the country. It is difficult for any mortal to cope with an abrupt ending and determine their next chapter.”

But the current chapter has become increasingly untenable for him.

As he makes his way through the Capitol, pondering his options for the future and going through various stages of grief over his brutal political downfall, Mr. McCarthy has retained small perks from his old life that serve mostly as painful reminders of all that is been. taken away.

He still has the kind of security provided to the runner-up for the presidency, but he has been removed from the speaker’s offices in the center of the Capitol, which serve as the building’s center of power. He has taken part in high-profile engagements, such as a recent speech at the Oxford Union and an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit, but those were booked before his resignation.

Many colleagues still regard him as a skilled convener of people with institutional knowledge about the workings of the Republican majority he helped build. But his inexperienced successor, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has not sought his advice on leading the fractious Republican conference. And Mr. McCarthy has had to watch from the sidelines as Mr. Johnson has made some of the same choices that led to his own downfall — such as working with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown — and there, at least until so far, has paid little price for it. .

Mr. McCarthy has made an effort to acclimatize.

“After any stressful situation, it takes a while for the body to normalize,” Mr. McHenry said of the former speaker. “And when you’re talking about the extremes of political ambition required to reach the speakership, wringing those chemicals out of your body to become a normal human being again is even more dramatic.”

On Instagram, where Mr. McCarthy recently shared photos of his dogs hanging out in his district office in Bakersfield, California, many of the people who commented on the photo chimed in to remind him that, despite his name, he is “@SpeakerMcCarthy “, the speaker no longer. (The title is technically his for life.)

House Republicans are beginning to move past McCarthy’s removal as they conduct business with Mr. Johnson at the helm. But Mr. McCarthy has not yet finished coming to terms with his defenestration. He’s someone who has never enjoyed being alone, and an emptier schedule leaves more time to spend in his own head.

As unpleasant as it may be to hang around Congress in his diminished state, Mr. McCarthy has been outspoken about the difficulty of deciding whether to leave politics, and when.

“I just lost, so you go through different phases,” Mr. McCarthy said in a brief interview after his DealBook appearance on Wednesday in New York City. “I need to know that if I go, there’s a place for me, and what am I going to do, and is that the best thing?”

Mr. McCarthy said he took his time in deciding whether to leave Congress, in part because he did not want to make a hasty decision that he might regret.

“I need to know that if I decide this isn’t for me and I leave, I don’t want to think a year from now, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left,’” he said. “So if it takes me a little longer than most people normally do, that’s exactly what I’m going through.”

Some centrist Republicans are urging him to stay.

“You have a lot of members who haven’t been here very long,” said Sarah Chamberlain, president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside organization affiliated with the congressional organization of the same name. “It takes a number of senior statesmen to teach the members how the process works, and he is one of the last ones standing.”

Mrs Chamberlain added: “On a personal level, I can completely understand if he decides to leave. At an institutional level it would be a shame to lose him.”

If McCarthy were to leave Congress immediately, it would also shrink the already slim Republican majority, which fell from four to three seats on Friday with the expulsion of Rep. George Santos of New York. (While Mr. Johnson presided over the vote to impeach Mr. Santos, Mr. McCarthy did not show up to take a stand.)

Still, it is highly unusual for a former speaker to choose to stay. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has broken with tradition and embraced her retirement, describing herself as “emancipated” from the pressures of her old job.

In September, the 83-year-old Democrat from San Francisco surprised some of her colleagues by announcing that she would run for another term. But Ms. Pelosi is at the end of a history-making career — she was the first woman to hold the position of speaker — and could leave her post, which she held for a total of eight years, on her own terms. The new generation of Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives treat her with respect and continue to seek her advice on major decisions.

By contrast, the awkward position of 58-year-old McCarthy, who held the top job for just over eight months and made history as the first speaker ever to be impeached, is all too evident.

Since January, when Mr. McCarthy agreed to make changes to appease the hard right to win the gavel, he and his allies had anticipated that his speakership could end exactly as it did. But that hasn’t made him any less bitter about it.

Although Mr McCarthy denied deliberately pushing Mr Burchett, he reacted angrily to the accusation.

“If I hit someone, they would know,” he told reporters, his voice sounding irritated. “If I punched someone in the kidney, he would be on the ground.”

He has gone on television to berate Mr. Burchett and the other colleagues who brought him down, and has urged the Republican conference to demand some retaliation against them, even though there appears to be little willingness to do so.

“I don’t believe the conference will ever heal if there are no consequences for the action,” Mr. McCarthy recently told CNN. He also said that Mr. Burchett and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also voted to impeach him, “care a lot about the press, not about policy.”

Despite his inner turmoil and painful power detox, Mr. McCarthy has made clear that he wants to use his remaining time, influence and campaign money to help his party maintain control of the House of Representatives. That could also serve a rejuvenating purpose for him if he chooses to intervene in congressional races to try to defeat the Republican members who voted to impeach him and strengthen the candidacies of those associated with him.

“Maybe I’m not a speaker,” he said during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure the Republicans win.”

Robert Jimison reporting contributed.