WASHINGTON — At some point during a routine seven-hour trip from his Oregon district to Washington, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, 75, a Democrat who has served in Congress for almost three decades, experienced a depressing epiphany.
“I distinctly recall crawling on yet another plane to come back for yet another vote that made absolutely no difference and was going absolutely nowhere,” he said.
Blumenauer’s moment of truth was far from singular. A total of 54 House members, or about one-eighth of the total body, will not be seeking another term this November.
For three of the 54, the issue was forced: one by expulsion (George Santos, R-N.Y.) and two by being gerrymandered out of winnable districts (Reps. Wiley Nickel and Kathy Manning, both D-N.C.). Two others died (Donald M. Payne Jr., D-N.J., and A. Donald McEachin, D-Va.).
Another 18 members vacated their seats to seek a different elective office. That leaves 31 members — 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats, 20 of whom were interviewed for this article — who have decided to leave the House of their own volition, with no electoral pressure to do so.
“The institution’s not functioning, the incentive structures are messed up and we’re not doing real legislating,” said one of them, Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., chair of the House Financial Services Committee. “So people are like, ‘Why am I here?’”
The list of the 31 departed, or soon to be, is hardly a roll call of the walking dead. It includes Mike Gallagher, 40, of Wisconsin, who left Congress in April, and Rep. Jake LaTurner, 36, of Kansas, both respected Republicans. Another exiting Republican is, like McHenry, a committee chair in her prime: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who leads the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
“When you’re losing people like Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Patrick McHenry, you’re losing your brain trust,” said Kevin McCarthy, who retired on Dec. 31 after being voted out of his post as House speaker.
Every one of the 20 members interviewed for this article spoke with pride of their tenure in Congress. Still, with few exceptions, they described an experience of diminishing rewards and increasing hardships.
They depicted an institution now dominated by brawlers and attention-seekers, “like they’re all auditioning for a political reality show,” said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., who is retiring after 22 years.
Brian Higgins, a Democrat who represented districts in western New York for 19 years before retiring in February, recalled that a formative moment occurred on the House floor in 2009, when a little-known Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress by yelling, “You lie!”
“Joe’s not a bad guy, by any means,” Higgins said. “But he’ll tell you his fundraising went through the roof right after that.”
The recognition that Wilson was onto something took awhile to sink in. But four years later, Congress had changed so much that Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, concluded that the advice he had sought from a predecessor who had left in 2003, Jim Hansen, was of little use.
“Everything he told me made no sense, and I realized that Congress was so different that he didn’t help me at all,” said Stewart, who left Congress last September. The difference, he said, was the inability of the Republican speaker at the time, John Boehner of Ohio, to discipline the raucous far-right exponents of the Tea Party movement who later became known as the House Freedom Caucus.
“There was nothing Speaker Boehner could do to influence the hard right,” Stewart said.
Still, governance in the Boehner era was not a dirty word, and the vast majority of new Republican members were receptive to direction from party leaders, according to Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, who was elected two years after the 2010 Tea Party class returned the House majority to the GOP.
But now, Wenstrup said, “I’m not sure if people now even accept the idea of being mentored.” He is retiring at the end of his term in early 2025.
One of the earliest members of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., was nicknamed “Hard Head” by Boehner for his unbudging fiscal conservatism.
But Republican leaders still saw promise in Duncan. By 2021, under a program introduced during Boehner’s speakership, Duncan became the designated mentor of freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
But Greene met with him only once, Duncan said, and seemed less interested in learning the ins and outs of Congress than in developing a social media following.
“I’ve told my colleagues in the Freedom Caucus many times, you need to learn how to take a win,” Duncan said. He has decided that this year will be his last in Congress.
Another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., left Capitol Hill for good in late March. Buck spoke wistfully of how an institution he revered had been taken over by “social media stars who are not well equipped to handle the rigors of Congress.”
“All they know is how to use social media to burn the place down,” he added.
Buck, Duncan and Wenstrup each insisted that the Democrats had their share of extremist show ponies as well. In reply, several Democrats maintained that even if this were so, their leftist colleagues were not hellbent on chaos like their far-right counterparts.
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