Departing Congress members have only over three months left in office. The next Congress is set to take office on Jan. 3, 2025.
The list of departing lawmakers is already long but can be expected to grow after the Nov. 5 general election. It’s virtually certain that it will expand shortly after Election Day when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is heavily favored to win California’s open Senate seat. Because Schiff is also set to win a separate election to fill the final two months of the late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s term, plus a new, six-year Senate term, he is expected to resign the House seat he’s held since January 2001 to become a senator about seven weeks ahead of the new Congress convening.
Some Capitol Hill short-timers won’t be particularly missed by even their party colleagues, as they’re effectively political pariahs within their parties or they proved so out of step with their party’s rank-and-file that primary voters ousted them in recent months.
Take Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has become a virtual outcast among Senate Republicans. The 2012 Republican presidential nominee, who was previously Massachusetts governor from 2003-07, didn’t exactly endear himself with some Republican colleagues over the years. Romney frequently criticized what he called their cowardice and fecklessness in confronting then-President Donald Trump.
Nor was Romney quiet, or behind the scenes about it, airing his grievances like a person who didn’t need the job, which, in a sense, was true because he already was a famous figure and also a multimillionaire from his private equity days. In Romney: A Reckoning, author McKay Coppins got exclusive access to the senator’s diaries and other documents. Coppins, a journalist at the Atlantic, packed his Romney book with juicy revelations from the politician’s career and his estrangement from the GOP.
Romney had special scorn for Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who is Trump’s running mate on the 2024 Republican White House ticket.
“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Romney is quoted as saying in the 2023 book, citing what he called an extreme kiss-up attitude toward Trump. The freshman senator replied, “Mitt Romney, of all people, is probably the least equipped to criticize how people have conducted themselves vis-a-vis Donald Trump.”
Vance added in May 2023 comments to reporters that Romney “attacked him and then he begged him for a job, and then he attacked them again and begged him for endorsement.”
Across the Capitol, in the House, a pair of Democrats who have been virulent Israel critics, particularly over its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, won’t be returning.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a member of the progressive “Squad,” lost the June 25 Democratic primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who has held state and local office for more than three decades. The southern Westchester County 16th Congressional District primary became one of the year’s ugliest intraparty brawls. Bowman alienated others by a string of embarrassing blunders he struggled to explain. Most notably the decision by Bowman, a former high school principal, to pull a false fire alarm in a House office building in September 2023.
Bowman’s House colleague, for now, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), similarly has had a knack for clashing with her party, from the left. Bush, another Squad member, was one of six House Democrats to vote against the passage of President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, saying it didn’t spend enough federal tax dollars for her taste.
Bush also knowingly alienated other House Democrats by citing her continued support for the movement to “defund the police.” That stance, though, quickly proved to be politically poisonous. Democrats, besides Bush and a few others, now are offering pro-police messaging, a big shift from where the party was in the summer of 2020. Then, the shocking police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led the party to imagine a future where public safety responsibilities shifted away from police officers.
But in the years since, as violent crime increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and Republicans began to attack Democrats as “soft on crime,” Democrats have turned back to embracing law enforcement.
On Aug. 6, Bush lost the Democratic primary in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District of St. Louis County and its northern suburbs to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell.
