This is at least a consensus theme in the American Congress: work there is becoming increasingly thankless and boring. At the end of the year, 22 Democrats and 11 Republicans in the House of Representatives had already announced that they would not run for re-election in the November 2024 elections. Usual averages, but these numbers are expected to increase over several weeks.
Three Democrats and four Republicans should be replaced even before this term, like Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who formalized his retirement in a letter dated December 19 after seventeen years in office. After failing to secure the coveted position of speaker due to opposition from a handful of extremist elected officials in his party, Kevin McCarthy announced his hasty resignation on December 31st. However, leaving the political field is out of the question. “I will raise a lot of money. I want to find conservatives who want to govern. “Chaos doesn’t help us,” he told journalists.
As the locus of political polarization par excellence, Congress has always experienced productive and other more fractious times, in which the coexistence of two majorities of different stripes in the House of Representatives and the Senate offered a narrow path to consensus. With every election we see a partial renewal of the workforce. But there is a special atmosphere in the 118th Congress. An example of this is the Republicans' holding hostage of aid to Ukraine and Israel to force the White House to change asylum rules in the United States. Likewise, in January 2024, elected officials will face a new looming shutdown, a halt to non-essential federal activities due to a lack of funding, for the third time in ten months after returning from vacation.
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Elected officials’ motivations for leaving the House of Representatives are varied. According to a classic movement, there are those who want to run for Senate or governor. There are those who have other plans far from Washington, in college education or near family. And those who leave unwillingly, like Republican George Santos, who was fired by his colleagues after countless scandals and a litany of lies; After his ouster, the Republican majority can no longer afford to lose by more than three votes per vote. But the focus is primarily on those who give up, exhausted and demoralized by an increasingly violent partisan game.
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