Congress is a very silly place

The news that China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher won’t run for reelection in his safe Wisconsin district may have surprised Washington, but it’s a decision that has been apparent for some time. The thirty-nine-year-old Marine veteran, touted by China hawks and Republican leadership as a rising star, is naturally frustrated by an utterly broken institution in the House. But it also serves as a warning shot to Republicans about what could come next.

If you’re in the position of being a chairman — Gallagher is the youngest of them — even an utterly dysfunctional chamber can still allow you to do some meaningful work in the committee. But if Democrats retake the House in 2024, being in the minority is a completely different animal. For those ambitious members who want to run statewide or take on key cabinet roles in the future, the votes they’ll have to take can hurt those prospects. And even if Republicans narrowly hold on, we’ve seen what that dysfunction looks like, too — with Rules votes going down based on a handful of defectors who are typically impossible to reason with. The pointlessness of working in such a body is omnipresent.

Another aspect is the particularly foreign policy-focused side of Gallagher’s work, where his emphasis has been that balancing against China requires smarter military expenditures to back our allies in the region. We just saw the debate play out in the Senate between a younger generation of leaders decidedly at odds with such efforts — as forty-eight-year-old Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri posted on X: “Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill. 15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO. Things are changing just not fast enough.” If you care about protecting against China’s encroachment, it’s very possible you can be more effective outside of Congress than inside of it.

Congress is a very silly place. What seems likely is that in the near future, the appeal of being a member of the House will continue to be, functionally, serving as hype men for your side of the partisan aisle. This appeals to a certain type of person — one comfortable with being away from family, doing constant television hits, and getting into constant scrums with your mirror image on the other side. This is a House that works for Matt Gaetz and Eric Swalwell — not for the people. And it seems like it’s going to remain that way for a long time.