NC Rep Mark Meadows: Being Trump’s chief of staff ‘would be an incredible honor’ | News & Observer

North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows says he’s honored by the rumors that President Donald Trump is considering Meadows as his next chief of staff.

“Serving as Chief of Staff would be an incredible honor,” Meadows said in a statement released to the media Monday afternoon. “The President has a long list of qualified candidates and I know he’ll make the best selection for his administration and for the country.”

Trump himself has yet to say publicly who he is considering for the job, but Meadows has been named by anonymous sources in multiple media reports, first reported by Axios on Sunday.

If Meadows were to take the job, it could mean that North Carolina will have two special elections for Congress in 2019. There’s also a potential special election that could be called depending on the outcome of the investigation into alleged election fraud in the 9th district race between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready.

In the case of the Harris-McCready race, since no one has been sworn in yet, a new election can be ordered either by the N.C. Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement or by Congress itself.

But if Meadows were to leave Congress to take the White House job, it would be up to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to arrange for a special election to fill his vacant seat. No one would be appointed to fill Meadows’ seat in the meantime, said Michael Bitzer, the chair of the politics department at Catawba College. And Cooper could choose basically any date for the election to be held, up until the November 2020 elections when it would normally be up for election anyway.

“A governor can decide when that election will be held,“ Bitzer said in an email Monday. “See Mel Watt’s 12th CD that was left vacant until the November election upon his appointment.”

In January 2014, former U.S. Rep. Mel Watt, a Charlotte Democrat, was appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency by then-President Barack Obama. When that happened North Carolina’s governor at the time, Republican Pat McCrory, kept Watt’s seat open for the next 10 months, until the November 2014 elections.

If there is a special election for Meadows’ seat, it would likely draw a heavily contested Republican primary. His district in western North Carolina was drawn by the Republican-controlled N.C. General Assembly to be a solidly Republican district. Meadows won it by more than 20 percentage points in the 2018 midterms.

Meadows has been one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress. In July, he was behind a failed attempt to impeach Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was then overseeing the Russia investigation.

However, there’s no guarantee Meadows would take the White House job or that he’s even a serious contender for it. Two other high-profile names that have been floated in multiple news reports are Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina Congressman who went to law school at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who worked for Goldman Sachs before joining the Trump administration. Politico reported Monday that Trump initially wanted to hire Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, but Ayers turned him down, “and set off a new round of staffing confusion at the White House.”

The only thing that’s certain so far is that on Saturday, Trump announced that his second and current chief of staff, John Kelly, will be out of that job by the end of 2018.

That set off the firestorm of speculation in Washington, D.C., about who would replace Kelly.

Meadows is the leader of the Freedom Caucus, a subset of Congressional Republicans who represent the party’s far-right wing. Many of their priorities on issues like immigration line up with Trump’s agenda.

If he took the job as Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows would walk into a tumultuous White House.

The special counsel investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is still ongoing. To date, Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, national security adviser and lawyer have all pleaded guilty to or been convicted of federal crimes as part of the investigation. The fallout over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues to grow. And even despite the corporate tax cuts Trump signed into law earlier this year, there’s a chance the stock market will have a negative year. As of Friday the Dow Jones was lower than it was at the start of 2018.

Trump’s new chief of staff will have to deal with those issues, and many more.

But at least some of Meadows’ colleagues believe he’s up to the job. On Monday, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, another Freedom Caucus member, said Trump “needs to pick” Meadows.

“He fully understands the facts and timeline and will make sure the White House is prepared to go toe-to-toe with a politically engaged James Comey in the 2020 reelection campaign,” Gaetz tweeted.