«What’s the point of being here?»
The list of congressional Republicans calling it quits keeps growing.
This week, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, announced he will be leaving politics to return to the justice system at the end of this year. “I enjoy our justice system more than our political system,” Gowdy said in a statement.
New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, who leads the Appropriations Committee, a highly coveted position, also announced his retirement this week, with four years left in his chairmanship. Twenty-one House Republicans have announced retirement this Congress, and a host of others are leaving to seek different political office or have already resigned.
Each departure has come with its own personal story. Some, like California Reps. Darrell Issa and Ed Royce are from swing districts; others are avoiding political fallout from scandal, like Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX).
But there are some overarching trends worth mentioning: Congressional leadership has increasingly centralized decision-making away from individual lawmakers and there’s a growing understanding that House Republicans could slip into the minority after this midterm election cycle. Paired together, lawmakers are likely asking themselves the point of being in the Capitol, said Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies Congress.
It’s a reality Gowdy has lamented for years, telling writer Marin Cogan in 2011, “Do I think I’m making a difference? No. Not from a legislative standpoint.”
Most of the congressional retirement announcements have come with a feeling of frustration; an admission that perhaps being in the House of Representatives lacks the influence that most associate with the country’s power center.
“I originally announced I was leaving because I thought I could do more in the governor’s seat, but today I believe actually I could do much more for the country by running for Senate,” Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH), who appears to have adopted an anywhere-but-here view of his career in public service, told Vox.
Another, Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH), a high-ranking member on Ways and Means Committee — still considered a highly desirable position — resigned from his congressional post this year to take an executive position with a business group in his home state. Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-FL), who sits in an increasingly Democratic district, attributed her early decision to retire in part to a level of partisanship and gridlock that she said is a “detriment to civility and of good government.”
There’s a tacit understanding that if lawmakers were polled for job satisfaction, the results would be pretty bleak, Roberts said.
James Wallner, now a political scientist with the conservative R Street think tank, who was a legislative director under Jeff Sessions and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and former executive director of the Senate Steering Committee under Toomey and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), can personally attest to this.
“When I was there, it was a miserable environment,” Wallner said of both the House and Senate. “The sense of powerlessness was pervasive — everyone feels powerless including the leaders.”
It’s only gotten worse. With only a slim margin of power, a deepening partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats, an ideological rift within the Republican Party, and an extraordinarily unpopular Republican president in Donald Trump — who has an apparent lack of policy knowledge — lawmakers have been left with a lot of “sitting around waiting,” Wallner said.
“These members didn’t sign up to come to DC to legislate peanuts.”
Perhaps the retirement most telling of a shifting political dynamic in Congress is Frelinghuysen’s.
As chair of the Appropriations Committee, the New Jersey Republican sits in a position that lawmakers work their entire careers to reach. And unlike many of the other lawmakers who are retiring at the end of their chairmanships, Frelinghuysen will walk away in the middle of his six-year term.
Conversations with outside observers, lawmakers, and political scientists point to three main factors that could be influencing this decision.
1) In today’s Congress, decisions are made by l eadership, leaving committees to atrophy
There’s no question that committees, much like “regular order,” have less of a role in today’s Senate on high-priority legislation. Committee chairs’ roles have diminished, and power has centralized in the leadership offices.
It’s been a long time in the making. Since the 1990s, committee chairs have been subject to six-year term limits — an effort to reign in the power of individual chairs. But in keeping these high-ranking lawmakers accountable to party leadership, the shift has contributed to the current GOP “paralysis,” Politico’s John Bresnahan writes:
Being chair once meant you were in the cool kids club, and assignments on powerful committees meant a say in major legislation debates. Now, there is less opportunity to participate, let alone dictate the agenda.
“Members are less invested in the process,” Roberts said. “They often don’t feel committed to the product that comes out. That leads into the ‘why am I here? I’m not doing anything — what’s the point of being here?’”
2) Banning earmarks means lawmakers don’t even have the little victories to take home anymore
The decline of the committees’ power is no more apparent than with appropriators — the group of lawmakers in control of the nation’s purse strings.
Once, not long ago, when it came to negotiating spending bills, lawmakers would start lining up around Appropriation Committee members — dubbed “cardinals” — on the House and Senate floor to win cash carveouts for special projects in their districts, called earmarks. The practice was banned in 2011, after Republicans argued it led to unnecessary spending and bred corruption.
The effect of banning earmarks, however, had serious consequences for members and committee chairs. It’s not lost on many Republicans that the past legislative year, jammed with difficult partisan votes on health care and a tax overhaul, could have been made easier if members were then able to go home with millions of dollars for a desperately needed infrastructure project.
It comes up “more often than you might realize,” said Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA), who sits in a vulnerable suburban seat.
Most likely, this could have given someone like Frelinghuysen, who himself is from a moderate Republican district and whose constituents had to swallow some difficult tax hikes from the SALT repeal, some political cover. Frelinghuysen voted against the tax bill.
3) If this is what being in control of both chambers and the White House looks like, it’s hard to expect a better future for Republicans
In the first year of controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republicans have been either mired in political infighting and inaction, or forced into difficult votes.
