GOP Sen. Shelby decides not to seek 7th term, retire in ’22
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Sen. Richard Shelby, the Senate’s fourth most senior member and a force in Alabama politics for more than four decades, announced Monday that he will not seek a seventh term in office in 2022.
The 86-year-old Republican has spent more than 40 years in Washington, serving first in the House and then the Senate.
During his time in the chamber, he chaired four major Senate committees, using his position and deal-making skills to direct billions in projects back to his home state.
Shelby is the fourth Senate Republican to announce his retirement, following Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Richard Burr of North Carolina.
His departure will leave a power void — and set the stage for a chaotic race to fill the seat at a time when the national Republican Party is deeply split on its future direction after former President Donald Trump’s term in office. While Shelby has amassed a far right conservative voting record, the measured Republican senator has not embraced the bombastic populist style of some Republicans.
In 2017, Shelby bucked his party when he announced that he could not support Republican Roy Moore, who faced sexual misconduct allegations, in the special election for Alabama’s other Senate seat. And last month, he was the only Republican in Alabama’s congressional delegation who voted to accept the presidential election results certified by Arizona and Pennsylvania. The other Republicans objected to the certifications in support of Trump’s baseless claim that the election was stolen.
Shelby’s official announcement that he would not run for reelection in 2022 came three days after The Associated Press reported that he had indicated to allies that he wouldn’t run again.
“For everything, there is a season,” Shelby said. “I am grateful to the people of Alabama who have put their trust in me for more than 40 years.”
The senator stressed that he will finish the two years remaining in his current term and remarked, “I have the vision and the energy to give it my all.”
One of Donald Trump’s major achievements was reversing the decline of the armed forces and beginning the long, vital process of rebuilding them. In cooperation with Congress, he added $100 billion to the defense budget over two years, and initiated reforms to enable the Pentagon to more effectively deter aggressors, especially China.
There’s a long way to go before the job is complete, of course. Four years was never going to be enough time to reverse the decades of neglect and underfunding which hurt the armed forces even before the disastrous sequester of 2013-18. But for the first time in a long time, a president actually managed to increase the present and future readiness of the armed forces during his term in office.
Perhaps even more important, Trump’s record demonstrates that a “peace through strength” agenda can unify the political right while also earning support from the center and at least parts of the left as well.
Let’s look at how Trump’s defense agenda was received by conservatives.
Republican “Never Trumpers” defined themselves by their disdain for the president. They attacked him for a lot of things, but increasing the defense budget, improving readiness, establishing the Space Force, increasing the size of the Navy, building out missile defense, buying next-generation equipment and giving military commanders more discretion to prosecute regional conflicts, were not among them.
On the other end of the conservative political spectrum are people deeply skeptical of military adventurism. Some are flat-out isolationist. Nevertheless, they also supported the president. They had less issue with his determination to invest in defense, because he paired this with a commitment to prudence in the application of force. Besides, to the extent that patriotic Americans want to pull back from foreign commitments, and form a kind of Fortress America, it makes sense for them to also want a damn strong fortress.
The center of the conservative movement is rooted in Reagan’s legacy of “peace through strength.” They supported Trump’s defense agenda because in all essential aspects it was their agenda.
Nor is a strong national defense supported only on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Trump could not have escaped the defense sequester, or established the Space Force, or initiated most of his other Pentagon reforms, without support from Democrats.
That’s no historical anomaly. Before Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, a coalition of both Democrats and Republicans worked on plans to rebuild America’s post-Vietnam military.
Going forward, support for a robust defense budget should continue to be not just acceptable but popular with a large cross section of political leaders, and for three reasons. First, in an age of great power competition, when a strong national defense is pivotal to keeping America safe, free and prosperous, leaders of good will know that increased funding for a reformed Pentagon is the one sine qua non to achieving both security and peace.
Second, the major objection to increasing the defense budget has always been that the government couldn’t afford it — that “fiscal restraint” requires freezing or cutting the defense top line. That argument was never sound; as the defense sequester has shown, it always ends up costing more to restore current or future readiness than it would have cost to maintain readiness in the first place. But it’s farcical now, after $4 trillion dollars have been borrowed in the last year alone, to suggest that the government cannot afford a 3-5% real increase in the defense budget.
Finally, the American people want to be secure, and one of the few institutions they still trust to keep them secure is the armed forces. In fact, America’s military is one of the few government institutions the American people still trust for anything at all.
Pundits will argue for a long time about why Trump lost his race for reelection, but nobody believes he lost because of his support for the armed forces. He was never attacked for his defense agenda, and not just because peace through strength is the right thing to do. It’s also very popular.
The American people know that building the capabilities of the armed forces while using them sparingly is the best path to peace and the most certain guarantee of security. If Trump had talked about it more himself, he might have won.