6th Texas Republican is quitting Congress
One of the country’s leading voices on national security issues for the last 25 years is calling it quits, becoming the sixth Texas Republican to announce plans to leave Congress in 2020 and further shaking up a delegation that has undergone a historic remake over the last three years.
U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Panhandle Republican, told reporters that while it has been an honor to serve, it’s time to move on. Thornberry is the longestserving Republican from Texas in the U.S. House and wasn’t afraid to clash with the Trump administration on topics ranging from Afghanistan to the Iran nuclear deal.
“We are reminded, however, that ‘for everything there is a season,’ and I believe that the time has come for a change,” Thornberry said in a statement. “Therefore, I will not be a candidate for re-election in the 2020 election.”
Thornberry, 61, has carved out a prominent role on national security issues since he was first elected to Congress in 1994. He was in the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11 and played a key role in helping create the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. He was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee from 2015 to 2019.
He’s the only Texan to ever lead that influential committee, despite the state’s outsize role in national security. Texas has 15 active-duty military bases and almost 123,000 soldiers deployed to it, including active duty and reserves. Only California and Virginia have more. Texas also has almost 1.6 million veterans — more than all but California.
Thornberry comes from a heavily Republican district that is
unlikely to become a target for Democrats in 2020. In 2018, Thornberry won 82 percent of the vote against his Democratic challenger, Greg Sagan. He won his last five re-elections with an average of 87 percent of the vote.
Republicans have been in the midst of a major upheaval in their ranks in Congress ever since Democrats regained the majority in 2018 and pushed former chairs of committees and subcommittees into less prominent roles. In all, 19 Republicans have announced they are not seeking re-election nationwide, including the six Texans.
After a big power shift in the House, the number of retirements for the former ruling party typically spikes as members who are used to being in the majority lose influence. Thornberry was also facing a term limit established by Republicans that bars them from serving too long as a chairman or ranking member of a committee.
Texas is coming off a 2018 cycle that already shook up its 36-member congressional delegation. Six Republicans and two Democrats did not seek re-election in 2018, and two Republican incumbents were defeated in the general election.
The retirements have taken a major toll on Texas’s clout in Congress. Besides Thornberry, the retirements have included former chairmen of prominent committees such as agriculture, energy, judiciary, financial services and ethics.
With six more Republicans headed for retirement, Texas will have lost 16 members of Congress in two years — equal to the total number of members of Congress from Ohio. That upheaval is more striking when compared with the previous decade, when Texas lost a total of just 11 members of Congress.
This year, Reps. Michael Conaway, R-Midland; Will Hurd, R-Helotes; Kenny Marchant, R-Coppell; Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land; and Bill Flores, R-Bryan, have all announced they will not seek re-election.
Hurd, Marchant and Olson’s districts are being targeted by Democrats. In 2018, Democratic challengers came within 4 percentage points of beating them.
“Texas is the biggest battleground state,” said Manny Garcia, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “Republicans know it, and Texas Democrats damn sure know it.”
Thornberry is one of the few Republicans who has been willing to challenge the Trump administration publicly. When the Trump administration offered less money for national defense in its initial budget in 2017, Thornberry questioned if “people at the White House understand how much damage has been done over the past several years” under the Obama administration.
He was also publicly critical of Trump pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal when he did, saying he preferred to give European allies more time to improve the terms of it. More recently, he’s been opposed to Trump’s plans to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to divert money from the Pentagon to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.