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

In a race against more politically experienced rivals, the Republican Study Committee chair is likely to push his business acumen as an advantage

Rep Kevin Hern (R-OK), the chair of the rightwing group known as the Republican Study Committee, has joined the broad race for the speakership after the ousting of Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) as the GOP nominee.

The House Republicans are now set to choose one of nine candidates following the failure of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Mr Jordan to get the required support.

Mr Hern announced his entrance into the race on Friday. He backed Mr Jordan but said on X that the House GOP needs “a different type of leader who has a proven track record of success, which is why I’m running for Speaker of the House”.

Mr Hern was considering running initially, but he declined to take on Mr Scalise and Mr Jordan. The 61-year-old, who voted to overturn the 2020 election, was nominated as one of the protest candidates in January during the chaotic 15 rounds of voting to make Mr McCarthy speaker.

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

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 in the late 1980s, Mr Hern purchased his first 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.

Rep Kevin Hern of Oklahoma is expected to run for speaker of the House of Representatives (Getty Images)

Mr Hern also launched a hog farm in Oklahoma, as well as 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.

Hern was nominated for speaker in January during the race won by Kevin McCarthy (Getty Images)

Mr Hern is the leader of the Republican Study Committee, which, with 156 members, is the largest rightwing caucus in the House. 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.”