Brady says he won’t seek 14th term in Congress
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a longtime congressman from The Woodlands and one of the most powerful Republicans in the House, announced Wednesday he won't seek a 14th term in office.
Brady, who was first elected in 1996, is the top GOP member on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and was its chairman as it drafted former President Donald Trump's tax rewrite in 2017. But Brady faces a term limit leading the committee at the end of 2022, which he said in his announcement was a factor in his decision not to return.
“In the end, I’ll leave Congress the way I entered it, with the absolute belief that we are a remarkable nation — the greatest in history,” Brady said in an address at the Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce Economic Outlook Conference.
Brady is the second member of the Texas delegation to announce his retirement this year, following U.S. Rep. Filemón Vela, a South Texas Democrat. Their announcements come as Republicans are already pushing to take back the House from a slim Democratic majority — something Brady said in his announcement he was confident would happen.
Brady’s departure will leave open a reliably red seat north of Houston as Texas lawmakers work to redraw congressional boundaries. Brady won re-election last year by 47 percentage points and it is unlikely Democrats will be able to gain much ground there in 2022.
He struck an optimistic tone in his announcement, saying he has not “lost faith in a partisan Congress and the political system” as he touted legislative accomplishments, including a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, a ban on surprise medical billing, and perhaps most notably, the GOP tax overhaul that he spearheaded in the House.
“The tax cuts lifted millions of Americans out of poverty and gave hope to so many the old tax code had left behind,” Brady said. “America recaptured the title of the most competitive economy in the world, bringing manufacturing jobs and investment back home to America from overseas.”
The historic rewrite of the tax code was perhaps Brady’s biggest win in Congress — and it’s one he will spend the end of his time there defending as President Joe Biden and Democrats are already targeting key elements of it, including raising taxes on corporations to fund a $2 trillion infrastructure package.
And while The Woodlands Republican said Wednesday he still believes Congress can work in a bipartisan manner, Brady expressed frustration over the early days of the Biden administration in a recent interview with Hearst Newspapers, calling the Biden White House the most partisan he’d worked with.
“President Biden’s strength of working across the aisle when he was a U.S. senator is nowhere to be found and the promises of unity — there’s simply not a finger being lifted to do that,” Brady said at the time.