Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023 | 2 a.m.
At the height of the chaos in the House of Representatives this year — after Republicans had ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy but battled each other to decide on a replacement — Georgia Rep. Drew Ferguson’s office and family began to be inundated with threats and hateful messages.
The threats weren’t from Russian operatives or even Democrats, but from grassroots Republicans livid at Ferguson for withdrawing his support from Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker. After watching Jordan’s allies harass his fellow House Republicans, Ferguson said the House didn’t need “a bully as the speaker.” And then the bullies came for him.
Republicans eventually installed Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana as speaker after leaving the post vacant for nearly two weeks for the first time in American history. But the threats, lies and dysfunction of those two weeks, along with the already toxic atmosphere that followed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, have been followed by an exodus of 50 members of Congress and senators.
One of those leaving is Ferguson, a low-key, business-focused congressman who tried twice recently to climb higher in the GOP leadership but failed. The former dentist couldn’t win over the more extreme members who get the attention and call the shots in Washington these days.
Instead, he’s opting to spend more time with his family. Former Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, who represented Ferguson’s district before him, sympathized with the decision.
“I was there for 12 years and it was nothing like it is now,” Westmoreland said. “It has to be complete misery.”
A big part of the misery are the people he called “five or six yo-yo’s,” the Republican rabble-rousers who tossed McCarthy without a plan to replace him. Because of the rules McCarthy agreed to, a handful of the angriest members were empowered to bring the entire chamber’s operations to a halt.
Where compromise and collegiality once got deals done, audacity and extremes now often win the day. Viral YouTube clips and screaming fundraising appeals get rewarded more than doing the hard work of making the government function.
No one is better evidence of that than McCarthy, whose last day in Congress came and went with little fanfare. With a narrow Republican majority and too many enemies among his colleagues to survive, the Californian was ultimately tossed as speaker after he compromised with Democrats in October to keep the federal government open.
McCarthy told a group of Capitol Hill reporters on his last day that he doesn’t regret his decision to strike a deal with the White House, “not at all,” because it also kept salaries going for members of the military. But he hammered the man behind his ouster, Florida GOP blabbermouth Matt Gaetz, whom McCarthy said was just trying to stop an ethics investigation into his own behavior.
“People study that type of crazy mind, right?” McCarthy said. “Mainly at the FBI.”
After McCarthy was deposed, but no consensus had been reached about who should succeed him, Rep. Patrick McHenry quietly kept the chamber running as speaker pro tem during those two weeks in October.
But the bow tie-wearing policy wonk from North Carolina has announced that he, too, will leave Congress at the end of the year, even after rising this year to head the Financial Services Committee he long wanted to lead.
“I believe there is a season for everything and — for me — this season has come to an end,” he said in a statement.
Ambitious people often leave Congress when they think there’s nowhere higher for them to go, and several of the names on the outgoing list qualify. Without being speaker, why would McCarthy stay? As an ally of McCarthy, McHenry could be limited, too.
But an astonishing number of the other members leaving Washington have said they genuinely worry for American democracy, but don’t see staying in Congress as the way to save it.
Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., told CBS News “the dysfunction of the place” is a big part of why he’s going.
Like Ferguson, Buck was targeted by Jordan’s GOP allies during the speaker’s race. After he announced he wouldn’t support Jordan for speaker, his landlord was so angry he sent him an eviction notice for his Colorado office.
“People are lying a lot. And when you call out the lies, you’re the bad guy,” Buck said of his Republican colleagues. “I feel like I can do more outside of Congress than inside of Congress.”
It’s not just Republicans leaving. Rep. Dan Kildee, a retiring six-term Democrat from Michigan, told The Wall Street Journal the dysfunction in Congress meant he couldn’t see staying in D.C. any longer.
“The last few years have been among the most difficult and frustrating times in my professional career with a chaotic House,” he said. “It’s hard to erase that experience from one’s mind in making this decision.”
Kildee is one of many more moderate members leaving a less-and-less moderate Capitol Hill. On the Senate side, Republican Mitt Romney of Utah and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia are both retiring, too. Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, a Republican, already resigned to take a job leading the University of Florida earlier this year, but not before he gave a floor speech in which he said he hoped his colleagues would do more working and less performative screaming for cable news hits.
Patricia Murphy is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .
