Last year’s appointment of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) to lead a new House select committee on China’s influence was hailed as a rare moment of bipartisan hope. Nearly 85 percent of the House voted in favor of the committee’s creation, and there were big plans for it.
Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called Gallagher “the right person to lead and advance this important agenda at this vital moment.”
Gallagher added at the time: “Just because this Congress is divided, we cannot afford to waste the next two years lingering in legislative limbo or pandering for the press. We must act with a sense of urgency.”
A little more than a year later, though, Gallagher has thrown in the towel on a clearly promising political career that some had tipped to end in the House speakership. While announcing his retirement last month, he urged everyone to “trust me, Congress is no place to grow old” — even as, having just turned 40, he could barely lay claim to middle-aged status. And then on Friday, he announced he is resigning from the House early, in a way that further hamstrings an already self-destructive House GOP majority.
If there were a moment that exemplified the decline of the governing wing of House Republicans, this would surely be it. But it’s merely the latest in a long line.
House Republicans have seen not only a succession of more-moderate members head for the door, but also those with a taste for actual legislating and getting things done.
Several stats stand out. First, we’ll look at those members giving up significant power — or potential power:
- Five committee chairs — more than 20 percent of all standing and select committee chairs — have announced their retirements this year, although one (Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green of Tennessee) later reversed course. Two of those chairs are subject to term limits, but Gallagher, Green and House Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) are not.
- More than one-fourth of Republicans on McMorris Rodgers’s powerful committee — eight of 29 — are retiring.
- The retirees also include four members who were either second or third in seniority on a committee, meaning they could soon have had chairmanships of their own.
- Another eight members who chair subcommittees are retiring.
- Three former members of House GOP leadership are among the retirees: McCarthy, former acting speaker; chief deputy whip Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.); and former chief deputy whip Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.).
- Twenty percent (eight) of the 40 most senior Republicans are retiring, even though just three of them are in their 70s or older.
Retirements have also slanted toward those who work across the aisle, which continues a trend from recent years:
- The retirees include five of the 20 Republicans with the worst ratings on the MAGA-aligned conservative group Heritage Action’s scorecard.
- Going back to the last Congress, 13 of the 20 Republicans with the worst ratings on the fiscal conservative group Club for Growth’s scorecard are either gone or will soon be gone.
- Of the 40 House Republicans with the highest 2021 Bipartisan Index ratings from the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, nearly half (17) have headed for the exits.
Gallagher fits virtually all of these categories. He’s a chairman who had a promising future in the Republican Party even apart from that role — there was a big push to recruit him to run for Senate last year — while demonstrating a willingness to work with Democrats. He’s conservative, but he’s also a governing conservative in a House full of members with less and less interest in governing.
If House Republicans keep disproportionately losing members like him, they’re going to keep seeing results like those of the past 14 months, during which time they have set new standards for their failure to legislate and their internal discord.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/25/gallagher-house-gop-decline/