Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to leave Congress early next year should serve as a warning to her colleagues.
“She’s almost like the canary in the coal mine. And this is something inside Congress, they’d better wake up, because they are going to get a lot of people retiring, and they’ve got to focus,” the former Republican House speaker said in an interview on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
Greene, a three-term representative from a solidly red district in northwest Georgia, a MAGA firebrand and strong supporter of President Donald Trump, announced on Friday night that she would step down from the House.
Her stunning news came amid Greene’s very public falling out with Trump over a handful of key issues, and in her statement and video announcing her decision, she made a sweeping indictment of the president and her party.
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Greene is one of nearly 40 current members of the House who are either leaving before their current two-year terms end, or who have said they won’t seek re-election in next year’s midterms.
And the surge in retirements may impact next year’s midterm elections, when Republicans are aiming to protect their fragile House majority.
“We’re above average,” noted David Wasserman, a senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan political handicapper “The Cook Report,” as he pointed to the pace of House retirement announcements so far this cycle.
And we’ve still got five weeks left until the calendar hits 2026.
Waves of retirement announcements traditionally come in the final month or two, amid the holiday season, in the year before congressional elections.
The party breakdown so far on the retirements: 16 Democrats and 22 Republicans.
A handful of the Democrats headed for the exits are in their 70s and 80s and retiring after long tenures in the House. The most prominent is 85-year-old former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But in a continued sign that the bitter partisanship in the House has made the lower chamber of Congress far from a pleasant work environment, most of the members who are passing on re-election are much younger.
Among those forgoing re-election next year is 53-year-old Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the House Budget Committee chair who shared his retirement news first with Fox News Digital.
“I have a firm conviction, much like our founders did, that public service is a lifetime commitment, but public office is and should be a temporary stint in stewardship, not a career,” Arrington said.
Also on that list is moderate Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, 43.
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“After 11 years as a legislator, I have grown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness that are now common from some elements of our American community — behavior that, too often, our political leaders exhibit themselves,” Golden wrote earlier this month in an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News, where he revealed his unexpected decision.
“I don’t fear losing. What has become apparent to me is that I now dread the prospect of winning. Simply put, what I could accomplish in this increasingly unproductive Congress pales in comparison to what I could do in that time as a husband, a father and a son,” Golden said.
Pointing to Golden’s comments, Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska noted: “He said something I was feeling. The thought of winning was unattractive this cycle. If it feels like it’s a little bit depressing to win, then better let somebody else run.”
“I think that’s where this hyper-partisan ugliness fits in. The thought of winning and going through another two years of this was not a fulfilling thought,” added Bacon, who earlier this year announced he wouldn’t seek re-election in 2026.
Bacon won nine heavily contested GOP primary battles and general elections over the past decade in his swing district.
But the retired Air Force general and moderate Republican who represents an Omaha, Nebraska-anchored congressional district told Fox News Digital last week that “the fire wasn’t there” anymore.
Former Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, who retired a year ago after serving a dozen years in the House, said the dysfunction and political tension in Congress was “definitely a factor” in her decision to leave.
“It had gotten so much more difficult over 12 years to work across the aisle,” Kuster told Fox News Digital. “It had gotten much more fractured, partisan, less congenial.”
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Kuster said “a big factor for me was that most of the moderate Republicans that I worked with all the time had left Congress. The people who were coming in were more hard right partisans.”
Bacon, who describes himself as a Ronald Reagan-style, old-fashioned Republican, joked that he was “stuck in the middle” with “crazies on the right and crazies on the left.”
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While some, like Bacon and Arrington, are taking a break from politics, most of those not seeking re-election to their House seats are running for statewide offices next year.
Wasserman said that “on the Republican side, there’s a sense that not much will get done beyond OBBBA in the next two years of Trump’s presidency.”
OBBBA is the acronym for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive GOP domestic policy bill passed along partisan lines this summer by the Republican-controlled House and Senate that is the centerpiece of President Donald Trump‘s second-term agenda.
“They’ve made the heavy lift and now there are opportunities to be more impactful elsewhere,” Wasserman said.
The bitter battle between Republicans and Democrats over the measure was another sign of the vicious partisan climate on Capitol Hill.
That partisan fighting was only amplified during this autumn’s showdown between Democrats and Republicans during the federal government shutdown.
Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who like Greene has experienced friction with GOP leadership in the chamber, pointed to Greene’s departure announcement and argued on X, “I can’t blame her for leaving this institution that has betrayed the American people.”
