Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s plan to leave Congress early next year should be taken as a wake-up call for lawmakers.
“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 Republican from a deeply conservative district in northwest Georgia, a prominent MAGA figure and close ally of President Donald Trump, announced Friday night that she will give up her House seat.
Her surprise decision comes after a high-profile rift with Trump on several major issues. In both her written statement and a video explaining her move, Greene issued a broad rebuke of the president and her own party.
Greene is one of nearly 40 sitting House members who either plan to leave before their current two-year terms are up or have said they will not run for re-election in next year’s midterms.
That wave of departures could shape the battle for control of the House in 2026, when Republicans will try to defend a narrow majority.
“We’re above average,” said David Wasserman, a senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan political handicapper “The Cook Report,” referring to the pace of House retirement announcements in this cycle.
And there is still time for more to come, with five weeks remaining before the calendar turns to 2026.
Retirement announcements frequently cluster in the last month or two of the year before a congressional election, often around the holiday season.
So far, 16 Democrats and 22 Republicans have announced they are stepping aside.
Some of the departing Democrats are in their 70s and 80s and are concluding long careers in the House. The most notable is 85-year-old former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But in another sign of how toxic the environment on Capitol Hill has become, many of the lawmakers walking away are considerably younger.
Among them is 53-year-old Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, chair of the House Budget Committee, who first shared his retirement plans 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 stepping aside is moderate Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, 43.
“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.
Reacting to Golden’s comments, Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said, “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 announced earlier this year that he will not seek re-election in 2026.
Bacon has survived nine fiercely fought GOP primaries and general elections over the past decade in his competitive swing district.
But the retired Air Force general and centrist Republican, who represents an Omaha, Nebraska–based district, told Fox News Digital last week that “the fire wasn’t there” anymore.
Former Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, who left Congress a year ago after 12 years in the House, said the growing dysfunction and tension were “definitely a factor” in her decision.
“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.”
Kuster added that “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 calls himself 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.”
While some, like Bacon and Arrington, are stepping back from elected office altogether, many of the lawmakers not running for their House seats are instead seeking statewide office 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 refers to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping GOP domestic agenda package passed on party-line votes this summer by the Republican-led House and Senate. The measure is the cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s second-term program.
“They’ve made the heavy lift and now there are opportunities to be more impactful elsewhere,” Wasserman said.
The bruising fight between Republicans and Democrats over that legislation was another example of the intense partisan warfare that now defines Capitol Hill.
That same hostility only deepened during this autumn’s showdown between the parties over the federal government shutdown.
Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who like Greene has clashed with House GOP leaders, pointed to Greene’s decision to resign and wrote on X, “I can’t blame her for leaving this institution that has betrayed the American people.”
