Is Kevin McCarthy still using the Speaker of the House office suite?

The sign is both an artifact of the past and a symbol of our strange present. It hangs outside of a warren of coveted offices between the House and the Senate beneath a cream-colored archway — a brown rectangle with gold lettering: “Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.”

“Do you know what’s happening?” a Capitol guide asked his group, who, for some reason had not stopped to take pictures with their phones the way seemingly every other group had. “They just fired him and are trying to replace him as we speak.”

Last week movers carried boxes marked “KOM personal” out of the multi-floor office complex, but 16 days after his humiliating ouster, Kevin Owen McCarthy hasn’t personally moved out himself. Instead, he has been using the space as a kind of headquarters to gather with his House allies, work the phones and figure out what happens next — for himself, and perhaps his conference.

With respect to the physical office …

“They’ll have to force me out,” McCarthy laughed as he walked beneath the sign bearing his name on Wednesday afternoon, more than two weeks since losing the title.

He was returning to his once-and-future suite from the House chamber where yet another attempt to elect his replacement had failed. Not that there was much to return to. “It’s all cleaned out; I’m just waiting for them to elect somebody,” he said, leaving behind a scrum of reporters and disappearing into the quiet and apparently bare sanctum.

Furnished or not, it’s primo real estate. Located just steps from the House floor, the speaker’s suite comes with two spacious conference rooms, a kitchenette, a cozy fireplace and a balcony with a stunning view of the National Mall.

McCarthy’s member office is on the fourth floor of the Rayburn building. Covering that ground could easily add thousands of extra steps to a congressman’s day depending on how many times they have to travel to the House chamber, even with the use of the little underground tram that connects offices to the Capitol. Life is better without the commute.

“I’ve never seen him over here,” said a staffer for Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), whose office is directly across the hall from McCarthy’s space in Rayburn.

This historic speaker-less moment has raised some heady questions. Questions like: How can the United States be a levelheaded leader on the world stage if one chamber of Congress has literally lost its head?

And: Have coalition politics been permanently replaced by a never-ending game of chicken?

And: Should McCarthy still have the key to the speaker’s private bathroom?

“Operating out of an office he no longer holds is peak McCarthy, actually,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who put this all in motion. “To McCarthy, image and performance were always more important than reality. If they weren’t, he might not be a squatter in that office today.”

Gaetz has leaned into (literal) office politics as part of his project to add insult to each injury he has inflicted on McCarthy’s ambitions. In January he accused McCarthy of trespassing in the speaker’s suite before he had the job, going so far as to tattle on his colleague in a letter to the Architect of the Capitol.

“What is the basis in law, House rule, or precedent to allow someone who has placed second in three successive speaker elections to occupy the Speaker of the House Office?” he wrote at the time. Gaetz never received a reply to his letter, and anyway, the legality of his occupancy became moot a short time later when, on his 15th attempt, McCarthy secured the necessary votes for the job he’d long pined for.

By all indications, McCarthy loved the office.

“We’re sitting in a room where we devise a lot of our ideas,” he said in a video filmed shortly after moving in. “We foster them. We grow them.”

He sat beneath a large painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware — Washington’s boat carrying a diverse array of passengers, which McCarthy believed evoked a message of unity.

“The one thing I believe we have done in this Congress is unite,” he said. “Unite this party. Unite all of our members together.”

Less than a year later, that fragile unity has shattered.

“Maybe they can even make a pretend gavel for him to swing around as he clings to the memory that he was once a failed speaker for nine months,” said Gaetz.

Not withstanding the taunts from the gentleman from Florida, most Republicans wanted McCarthy to remain as speaker. Only eight members of the party voted to strip him of his speakership (along with Democrats), and so far none of his would-be replacements have come close.

“There is a great deal of support for McCarthy,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “It was an unusual combination of a few members with personal animus combined with Democrats.”

Like other House Republicans interviewed for this article, Cole said he hadn’t given much thought to who has a right to use the office.

“I think he’s moving out,” he said of McCarthy. “These things take time.”

Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who had come to the Capitol to help sort out the leadership mess (“Give me 30 minutes, I’ll sort it out,” he joked), said that he never personally had a hard time letting go of an office.

“I’ve had really great offices, historic offices,” he said. “But, I don’t know, you spend your time there, and then when the time comes you move on. I did, and I have had a great life ever since.”

In the absence of a permanent speaker, there doesn’t appear to be an institutional push to evict McCarthy from the space. The Architect of the Capitol did not return requests for comment, and the Committee on House Administration declined to speak on the matter. When McCarthy was ousted, Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) became the speaker pro tempore. It’s possible that McHenry — who also has been using the office — could kick out the previous tenant. But it’s not clear he’d care to do so, being a friend and ally of the now-former speaker.

McHenry has used his power to evict people who are not Kevin McCarthy. One of his first moves in the new job would be to remove former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) out of one of her offices — an unmarked room in the Capitol known as a “hideaway.”

“Republicans seem to care more about office space than governance,” Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Frankly, we don’t care who’s squatting in the Speaker’s Office right now — just as long as they vacate next year when Hakeem Jeffries moves in.”

Largely seen as a vindictive measure against Democrats, the move was also, according to CNN, an effort to find a convenient new office for McCarthy. On Thursday, a large pile of newspapers outside the hideaway seemed to indicate that no new tenant has moved in since Pelosi got the boot.

“I guess she didn’t leave a forwarding address,” Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) posted alongside a photo of the unclaimed mail on X. “I may have to implement squatters rights.”

Why not? Seems like exactly what a Republican leader would do in these unprecedented times.

Paul Kane contributed to this report.