Who is ‘McCongressman’ Kevin Hern, weighing run for House speaker?

Rep Kevin Hern (R-OK), the chair of the rightwing group known as the Republican Study Committee and a probable candidate to succeed Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, would bring a new dimension to the race, having spent a successful career as a multi-faceted businessman.

In addition, the former owner of more than a dozen McDonald’s franchises and a range of other enterprises, the 61-year-old was first elected to Congress five years ago, meaning that his whole political career has played out in the Trump era of Republican politics.

While Mr Hern wrote on X on 6 October that “I still haven’t made a decision on my candidacy for speaker”, The Wall Street Journal reported days earlier that he told the Texas House delegation that he intends to join the race.

Meanwhile, he was nominated for speaker in January as one of the many protest candidates against the now-ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

Mr Hern initially studied for a PhD in astronautical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but following the Challenger disaster in 1986, he left without finishing the degree. In 1999, he got an MBA from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

After working for McDonald’s as a manager from the late Eighties, Mr Hern purchased his first McDonald’s franchise in 1997, later owning as many as 18 restaurants in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, area, an achievement that earned him the nickname “McCongressman”, a moniker coined by The Frontier. He eventually reached the McDonald’s national leadership team, but as of 2021, he had sold all his restaurants, the Tulsa World noted.

Mr Hern also launched a hog farm in Oklahoma, in addition to a community bank and a number of news outlets covering high school sports.

As of 2019, he operated a firm that made furniture for fast-food companies with assets valued at between $38.7m and $92.9m, according to The Oklahoman. The paper published an article on 27 January 2019 with the headline “Hern worth more than rest of state’s congressional delegation combined”.

Meanwhile, his KTAK Corporation got between $1m and $2m in loans via the paycheck protection programme during the Covid-19 pandemic, even as he bashed deficit spending.

“While there is no easy fix to this, the first step is clear: stop adding to it,” he said in 2018 regarding getting to a balanced budget, The Washington Post noted in 2020.

“This isn’t a bailout. It’s a repayment of what the government has taken away from American workers and businesses,” he said that year after supporting the Cares Act even though it added to the national debt.

Mr Hern is the leader of the Republican Study Committee, which, with 156 members, is the largest rightwing caucus in the House. Only in his third term, he’s much less experienced than his possible competitors for the speakership, two of whom — Reps Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Steve Scalise (R-LA) — have already thrown their hats into the ring.

But he has pushed his business acumen as an argument to support him in a heavily anti-government and mostly pro-business caucus.

“I think you have to have a different set of skill sets,” Mr Hern has said. “Strife is something that’s common when you have people working together and finding common solutions for it takes experience.”