Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Mike Johnson (LA-04)
WASHINGTON — Speaker Johnson delivered a tribute on the House Floor today in honor of Hayden Haynes, who has served as Speaker Johnson’s Chief of Staff during his entire tenure in Congress.
“Even before the Speakership, before the Cannon office that was split in the middle by a women’s restroom, before the apartment campaign office above the radio station, it was Hayden who built this ship from the ground up. I will always be grateful for that, and we’re going to miss him,” Speaker Johnson said.
Watch Speaker Johnson’s remarks here.
Below are Speaker Johnson’s remarks as delivered:
I just want to take a brief point of personal privilege today to bid farewell to the most integral member of my staff and somebody who’s been by my side for more than a decade here: my Chief of Staff, Hayden Haynes. We all do this. We deeply value our teams, and when you lose a leader, it’s a big thing, and Scripture says we give honor where honor is due. So, I want to do that for just a moment here.
I first met this guy, Hayden, in 2016. I was a member of the Louisiana legislature; I just got started and we crossed paths at a local political event. He was bright and ambitious and eager to talk more. You’ve all experienced this – you’ve got staff members like that, young people, kids that you meet along the way. And I was impressed with him. He called me the next day to reach out to set up lunch, and I thought, “Okay, he’s a young guy, I’ll invest the time.” I had no idea what the purpose was for the lunch. I didn’t know it was going to be a strategy session for the future of my career, but that’s what happened. So, this young fella just came in.
Maybe you guys can relate to this, maybe you’ve had a meeting like this. A young, bright, ambitious guy comes in, and he has a yellow pad. He sits down at lunch at a pizza joint, and it says at the top of the pad ‘Path to Congress’ in big, bold letters and across the top. He spent the next hour mapping out what he saw to be a road to D.C. that ran through our little town of Shreveport, Louisiana. I thought it was amusing, but we didn’t have an open Congressional seat, and I appreciated him for his time. And we left there with nothing but an agreement to keep in touch.
Well, as fate would have it, a couple months later, the Fourth Congressional seat did open up and my predecessor called and encouraged me to run, and others did as well. My wife, Kelly, and I prayed about it, and we felt like we should do it. And the first thought I had was this young man who sat down with a yellow pad. So, I called him up. He came on board and he became my first campaign manager, and together we worked nights and weekends. We had a dingy little office above a local radio station. We had no funds, no name ID, no connections – I mean, it really was amazing. But one thing we had was, Kelly and I had complete faith in what we felt like God had called us to do, and we had total faith in this young kid because he was so ambitious and bright, and he had that yellow pad.
Well, fast forward, we won the race. It was in Louisiana, and we have jungle primaries like they have in California and a couple other states. And it was an eight-way race. We won it, and it was the first of many victories that we’d had together. We were on our way to Washington. In Louisiana, we have a late election cycle because it’s a jungle primary and the runoff is in December. So, if you are elected as a freshman from Louisiana, you come in as the last Member of your freshman class. I got the lowliest office draw. I got the worst office in Congress, as noted by Washington Post. We really started at the bottom, but we navigated life as a freshman.
Hayden got to work. He built out our office. He put a lot of time and attention into personnel because personnel, as we all know, is policy. And the first thing he did, and this is a good trait, I think, for all of our leaders to have, is he had all of his staffers, he required everybody to go and visit the district that we represent, to get to know the people, to remember who sent them there and why. And it was such an important way to kind of set the pace for how our office would be run.
He also navigated my elections. I became Chair of the Republican Study Committee in my second term, and then we became Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference in our third and fourth term. But while he was doing all that here, he was also running the campaigns back home every two years. And we all know what a burden that is. It’s rare to have a person who could do policy and politics – and he was also one of the youngest chiefs on the Hill – but we did all that. And we got through it.
And then the biggest challenge of our lives came next, and everybody remembers what happened about two and a half years ago now. I was nominated by my colleagues for this job – an unexpected race for Speaker. And Hayden in that operation was my Chief. He was my whip. He was my right hand all in one, all hands on deck. My staff refers to that as building a plane as we were flying it. It was like launching a 747 with no wings or an engine. You know, we had to put it all together. There was no playbook for it. It’s important to remember that nothing like that had ever happened in this institution, and it took it took a lot of fortitude to do it. And this guy was responsible for it. The average tenure before somebody Speaker of the House is 16 years. We’d only been here 6.8 years, and we had no playbook designed at all.
So, we set up an entire organization; the political, the legislative, the staffing infrastructure, all that in a matter of just a couple of weeks, and it was amazing. No shortage of intrigue surrounds this time in our lives. But what’s not recognized enough, and this is true for all of us, is the dedication and the sacrifice of our teams, especially those at the top of your organization, and how much of their lives they give to this stewarding, helping us to steward this sacred institution.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Hayden’s lovely wife. She’s here tonight. Jennifer is up in the balcony up there with their little one, Brody.
Look, I’ll just say this on behalf of all the families, of all the staff who serve us, we owe an eternal debt of gratitude to these folks. It’s impossible to overstate their sacrifice. Late nights, long hours, high stakes. And they give their all. And they don’t get paid enough for that and we all know it. But we couldn’t run the operation without them. But we’re grateful to their families, to Brody and Jen for their selflessness and patience, and for sharing their dad and husband with us these many years.
So, I’m just going to close with this. I’m going to say to this young man, this country boy from Minden, Louisiana, this political whiz kid who envisioned my path before I did, this loyal friend who’s been a constant throughout every season of our journey. There are only a handful of people in Washington, you all know, that you can really, really, truly trust completely. And Hayden’s been one of those people for me. And I pray that you have somebody just like that. I know you all do, and I hope you treasure them.
Even before the Speakership, before the Cannon office that was split in the middle by a women’s restroom, before the apartment campaign office above the radio station, it was Hayden who built this ship from the ground up. I will always be grateful for that, and we’re going to miss him. We’re going to have a lot of tough fights. He’s been with us for all those fights along the way, but he’s earned some downtime. And I’m really grateful that he and Jen and Brody are going to get that. I wish them the best. Thank you for indulging me. God bless you in your next chapter, my friend.
###