San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Reps’ ‘Texodus’ taking state’s clout in U.S. House
In just two years, Texas has lost more members of its delegation to Congress than it did in the previous 10 years combined, putting a huge dent in the Lone Star State’s influence in the U.S. House.
When San Antonio Republican Will Hurd announced his retirement Thursday, he became the third Texas Republican to announce he’s quitting Congress.
Combined with the 10 members who quit or lost re-election in 2018, Texas stands to lose 13 members — just over a third of its 36-member delegation — in less than two years.
In the previous 10 years combined, Texas lost just 11 members of Congress.
With more retirements still possible headed into 2020 elections, Texas is looking at an exodus — or as one national analyst called it, a “Texodus” — that’s remaking the delegation with a lot less seniority and fewer leadership slots that typically are reserved for more senior members.
Only one member of the U.S. House from Texas, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, chairs any committee in Congress where the national policy agenda is shaped. She heads the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
Compare that to just a year ago when seven committees in the House were led by Texans, including the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and the House Armed Services Committee.
Texas has had speakers of the House, majority leaders and almost always had major players leading influential committees.
“This is a surprise for a lot of people who are used to seeing a lot of Texans in positions of power,” said Larry Sabato, director of the
Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
A major factor is that Democrats gained control of the House in 2019 after being in the minority for nearly a decade, but the trend also has grown more pronounced as political divisions have widened.
Sabato pointed out that several of the Texans who have left or are leaving were former committee chairs, such as 14-year veteran U.S. Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Midland, who announced his retirement Wednesday after serving as chairman of the House Ethics Committee and the Agriculture Committee.
“Being in the minority is a frustrating experience,” Conaway said.
Former U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, a San Antonio Democrat, said being in the minority also has gotten a lot worse over the years.
He said when he was elected in the 1990s, Democrats were in the minority but Republican committee chairs often gave them a chance to have input.
He said the next time he went into the minority after 2010, the partisanship was so bad that he and other Democrats could get virtually nothing done.
Gonzalez, who didn’t seek reelection in 2012, sums up the difference between being in the majority and in the minority in Congress like this: “One day it’s like you’re drinking the finest wine, and the next day you’re the one squeezing the grapes.”
Departures across U.S.
Texas Republicans hardly are alone in having second thoughts as they launch re-election campaigns knowing that even if they win, they will be stuck in the minority.
Already this year nationally, 14 members of Congress have announced they won’t seek re-election, including 11 Republicans.
Hurd, Conaway and U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, who announced in June he won’t run again, are three of those 11.
There are other Republicanheld seats in Texas that bear watching, said Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which analyzes every congressional race in America.
Wasserman said that as he charts what he’s calling the Texodus, he is keeping an eye on Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Austin; Kenny Marchart, R-Coppell; and John Carter, R-Round Rock.
All three narrowly won re-election in 2018 and are facing the prospects of even more intense reelection campaigns in 2020.
Republicans say they don’t expect this election’s retirements to reach last year’s levels, when 34 Republicans nationally left — the party’s most retirements since at least 1930.
Still, “there’s a mood of tremendous frustration with the lack of accomplishment,” Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Mich., said in an interview last week, days after stunning colleagues when he said he’s leaving after just two House terms.
Mitchell, 62, blamed leaders of both parties for prioritizing politics over problem-solving.
Mitchell also criticized President Donald Trump’s tweets last month telling four Democratic congresswomen of color — including his Michigan colleague, Rep. Rashida Tlaib — to “go back” to their home countries, though all are American.
The tweet was “below the behavior of leadership that will lead this country to a better place,” Mitchell said.
Other Republicans in the Capitol and outside it say the frustration runs deeper.
They describe worries that they won’t win back the majority in 2020, which would mean two more years of legislative futility, and exasperation over Trump’s outbursts, including his tweets taunting the four Democratic women, which were widely seen as racist.
“The White House isn’t helping the atmosphere up to this point for these guys. They’re having to answer every day for things they didn’t say or do,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. “That’s not a good place to be.”
Democrats currently hold 235 seats compared to 197 for Republicans. There are two vacancies and one independent member of the House.
In years after power shifts in Congress, there typically is a spike in retirements from the party that had been in the majority.
Since 1990, on average 11 Democrats and 12 Republicans retire from Congress every two years. But that number is much higher in years after members who have been in the majority suddenly are forced to live in the minority.
In 1994, after Republicans retook the U.S. House, 22 Democrats who had been in the majority retired. In 2006, after Democrats regained the majority, 21 Republicans pushed into the minority retired. In 2010, a tea party-inspired wave helped Republicans retake the majority, and 14 Democrats retired from politics.
Hurd’s departure only increases the chance that his seat will flip to a Democrat.
Hurd narrowly won his re-election in 2018 and was considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress by virtue of representing a district that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.
Olson’s seat similarly becomes a bigger target for Democrats without an incumbent in the race to overcome. Olson won his re-election by 5 percentage points — 14 percentage points closer than two years earlier.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee already had set up a Texas office to target Hurd’s and Olson’s positions among others even before either announced they would not seek re-election.
Hurd said Democrats have a chance of winning Texas in the presidential campaign in 2020, despite the fact that a Democrat hasn’t carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
“When you look at trends, the two largest-growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people. And we know what the broader trends are happening there,” Hurd told the Washington Post.