The House Republicans Who Have Had Enough

Published

1 year ago

January 8, 2024

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House Republicans didnt exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.

The rest of the year wasnt any more productive. Thanks in part to Republican discord, the House passed fewer bills that became laws than any other year in decades. And for the few important measures that did pass, GOP leaders had to rely on Democrats to bail them out.

Republican lawmakers have responded by quitting in droves. After the House spent much of October fighting over whom to elect as speaker, November saw more retirement announcements than any single month in more than a decade. Some members arent even waiting for their term to end. McCarthy resigned last week, depriving the party that fired him of both his experience and, more crucially, his vote. Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, a Republican, and Brian Higgins of New York, a Democrat, are each leaving for new jobs in the next several weeks. (Santos would have stuck around, but his colleagues had other ideas.)

Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

A roughly equal number of members from each party plan to forgo reelection this year. But the most powerful departing lawmakers are Republicans: The chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Kay Granger of Texas, is leaving after a quarter century in Congress, and the head of the Financial Services Committee, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, will end his 20-year House career next year.

Still, some Republicans are leaving after just a few years in Congress, including Representatives Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Debbie Lesko of Arizona, both former state legislators. For them, serving in Congress simply isnt all its cracked up to benot when your party cant seem to figure out how to govern. People dont engage with each other, Lesko told me. They just make speeches.

Here are the stories of four Republicans who are calling it quits at different stages of their career: McHenry, a onetime rabble-rouser who became a party insider; Brad Wenstrup, an Army podiatrist whose House tenure spanned from the Tea Party to Donald Trump; Spartz, a conservative with an impulsive streak; and Lesko, a Trump loyalist who never quite found her way in Washington. Taken together, their departures reflect the rising frustrations within a Republican Party that has floundered in the year since it assumed power in the Housea year in which it has spent more time fighting than governing.

Debbie Lesko

On October 17, after House Republicans had just tanked their third choice for speaker, Representative Debbie Lesko finally decided shed had enough: She wouldnt be seeking reelection. The 65-year-old grandmother of five had been planning to stay for one more term, but the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and the weeks of chaos that followed changed her mind. It kind of put me over the top, Lesko told me.

Lesko had higher hopes for Congress back in 2018, when she won a special election to represent a safely Republican seat north of Phoenix. Perhaps I was naive, she conceded. Lesko prioritized border security during her first campaign and managed to get one border-related bill signed into law while Trump was president and Republicans controlled the House in 2018, but her legislative goals have fallen short since then. In the Arizona state legislature, she had served in the leadership and chaired two powerful committees. I was used to getting things done in a bipartisan fashion, Lesko said. The House proved to be far more difficult terrain. As a Trump ally, Lesko found few willing Democratic partners after the GOP lost control first of the House majority in 2018 and then of the presidency in 2020.

In Arizona, Lesko said, lawmakers actually debated bills and amendments on the floor of the House and Senate; in Washington, by contrast, members just deliver speeches written for them by their young staff. We dont listen to each other, Lesko lamented. We just go in and read a statement. She bemoaned the lack of civility and the hurling of personal insults between members in both parties. (When I asked if Trump had contributed to the incivility, she said, I would prefer he not attack people personally, but he does a great job.)

Lesko told me she enjoyed most the days she spent interacting with constituents back home, but over six years, they could not make up for the family time she gave up on cross-country flights and on fundraising. If I felt we were getting a whole lot accomplished, I would sacrifice it, she said. Instead, Republicans spent a week in January 2023 fighting over their speaker and then did it all over again in October. That certainly didnt make me feel like I wanted to stay, she told me.

Patrick McHenry

Representative Patrick McHenry introduced himself to much of America last year as a very frustrated man. The North Carolina Republican opened his unlikely stint as House speaker pro tempore with a memorable slam of the gavela brief eruption of anger aimed at the rump group of Republicans who had dethroned his ally, Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Read: We put sharp knives in the hands of children

When McHenry arrived in Congress nearly two decades ago, he might have counted as one of the renegades. He was a brash 29-year-old who liked nothing more than to pick fights with Democrats on cable news. After his first term, however, McHenry began to shift his strategy and redraw his image. He wanted to become a serious legislator, capable of using influence in Congress to affect public policy. I realized that my actions were not enabling my goal, so I changed how I operated, he told me. He became less of a partisan brawler and more of an inside player, studying the institution and how leaders in both parties wielded power. My early years in Congress were like graduate school, McHenry said.

McHenry is leaving with a reputation as a widely respected if not-quite-elder statesman (hes only 48). He serves as the chair of the Financial Services Committee and acted as one of the GOPs top negotiators of perhaps the most significant bill to come out of Congress last year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which prevented a debt default and ordered modest budget cuts. McHenry is retiring in part because he has to give up the committee gavel he so enjoys; Republican term limits allow most members to hold top committee posts for up to six years.

He also passed up a bid for a more permanent promotion. At one point in October, some of the same Democrats who had chafed at McHenrys bombast as a young lawmaker were open to the idea of him serving as speaker. McHenry told me hed wanted to be speaker earlier in his career, but not anymore. He refused entreaties to seek election as speaker or even to use his temporary position to try to pass legislation. It would have been to the institutions detriment and, frankly, even to mine, he told me. So I decided the best course of action is to want for nothing during that time period, and that meant resisting the opportunity to use power.

When McHenry announced his retirement from the House two months later, he insisted that he was departing with none of the bitterness people might assume he carried. I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn, he said in his statement. When I asked him what gave him hope, he tried to put a positive spin on the dysfunction and disenchantment that have plagued Congress for years. The operations of the House have been under severe pressure for a while, McHenry said. We have an institution that is struggling to perform in the current political environment. He then made a prediction: Therell be significant changes that will happen in the coming congresses to make the place work.

He wont be around to see them. The GOPs term limits for committee leaders is n often-underappreciated reason for turnover in the partys House ranks, but McHenry declined to seek a waiver so he could stay atop the Financial Services Committee. Im going to honor our rules, he said. He hasnt decided what comes next: This chapter is closing, and Ive got another chapter ahead of me.

Brad Wenstrup

This much is clear: Representative Brad Wenstrup is not leaving the House out of frustration with Washington gridlock. I reject the notion that this has been a do-nothing House of Representatives, he told me. Wenstrup proceeded to read from a list that he said ran to 20 pages of bills that the narrow Republican majority had advanced through the lower chamber of Congress over the past year. Most of these measures are gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the fact that a onetime outsider like Wenstrup would be defending an embattled institution so fervently is itself something of a revelation.

Wenstrup won election to the House a decade ago as a Tea Partybacked insurgent, having defeated an incumbent Republican in a surprising 2012 primary challenge from the right. Hell leave next year as a leadership loyalist, positioned in the ideological center of a GOP conference that has grown decidedly more conservative in the past decade. He voted for the debt-ceiling deal in June, despite having criticized his first Republican opponent during their campaign for backing a similar bipartisan agreement. Am I a conservative? Yes, he said. Did I try to advance common sense? Yes. Did I try to establish myself as a statesman? Yes.

Read: We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.

Wenstrup has become an institutionalist in other ways too. His biggest complainta common one among small-government conservativesis that federal agencies have taken too much power from Congress, evading proper oversight and interpreting laws beyond the intent of the legislators who wrote them. We have to bring back Schoolhouse Rock, Wenstrup said, recalling the cartoon that taught a generation of Americans a somewhat-idealized version of legislative sausage-making. A bill on Capitol Hill gets signed by the president. Thats the law. Agencies dont get to change it.

An Iraq War veteran who served as a combat surgeon, Wenstrup, 65, started his family later than most and has two young children in Ohio. He told me he had decided that this term would be his last in the House before any of the speaker tumult of the past year: I decided that I wanted to make sure that I raised my kids, not someone else.

Victoria Spartz

Good luck trying to predict Representative Victoria Spartzs next move. The Indiana conservative is leaving Congress next year after just two termsassuming she sticks with her plan.

That hasnt always been the case during Spartzs short tenure in the House. She is fiercely protective of her options, and she has made her name by going her own way. At one point this fall, she threatened to resign her seat if Congress did not create a commission to tackle the federal debt. I cannot save this Republic alone, she said at the time. (Congress has created no such commission, but Spartz isnt leaving quite yet.)

Spartz, 45, is the only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, and she assumed a prominent role in the GOP after Russias invasion in 2022. Her nuanced position on the conflict has defied easy characterization. While cheering for Ukraines victory, she sharply criticized its prime minister, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a time when much of the West was rallying to his side. Spartz has accused Zelensky of playing politics and theater and demanded an investigation of one of his top aides. When members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee traveled to Ukraine on an official visit without hershe doesnt serve on the panelSpartz paid her own way and crashed the trip. She supports more U.S. aid to Ukraine, but not without conditions, and she believes that the funding must be more targeted toward heavy military equipment rather than humanitarian assistance. Ukraine must win this war, she told me, but wars are won with weapons, and we need to be much faster, much tougher, and better.

Spartz again proved to be a wild card during the Houses recurring struggles over picking a speaker. During the 15 rounds of balloting last January, she supported Kevin McCarthy on the first three turns, then voted present eight times before returning to McCarthy for the final four rounds. In October, she voted with McCarthys critics to bring up a resolution to oust him as speaker, but on the climactic vote, she stuck with McCarthy. Kevin wasnt a bad guy. He just didnt like to govern, Spartz said.

Midway through Spartzs first term, Politico reported on high staff turnover in her congressional office, quoting former aides who described Spartz as a quick-tempered boss who frequently yelled at and belittled her underlings. Spartz made no effort to deny the accounts, telling Politico that her style was not for everyone. After winning a second term that fall, however, Spartz quickly announced that she would not seek office in 2024forgoing both a third bid for the House and open statewide races for governor and Senate in Indiana.

Her departure, she insisted to me, represents a break from politics, and not a retirement. Sometimes its good to take some time off, Spartz said. She denied that any of the drama of the past two yearsthe war in Ukraine, the speaker fights, criticism of her managementcontributed to her decision to leave. Her children are now teenagers, Spartz said, and she wants to spend more time with them.

Still, Spartz doesnt quite seem at peace with her plans. Given her past shifts, I asked if she still might change her mind and run again. She wouldnt, she said, but with a caveat: Unless I get real upset!

Given the volatility of the past year in Congress, thats a threat it would be wise not to ignore.

Entertainment

Sir Keir Starmer hosts creators of hit Netflix drama Adolescence – and tells them he’s ‘not found it easy viewing’

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1 hour ago

March 31, 2025

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Sir Keir Starmer hosts creators of hit Netflix drama Adolescence - and tells them he's 'not found it easy viewing'

Sir Keir Starmer has met with the creators of Adolescence for talks on how to prevent young boys being dragged into a “whirlpool of hatred and misogyny”.

The prime minister hosted a roundtable in Downing Street with co-writer Jack Thorne and producer Jo Johnson to discuss issues raised in the series, which centres on a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a young girl and the rise of incel culture.

Opening the meeting, which was first revealed by Sky News earlier this month, Sir Keir thanked the show’s creators for the conversation they have started.

Politics Live: UK expecting to get hit by Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs

He said he and his wife had watched the drama with his 14-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, and that “as a dad, I have not found it easy viewing”.

Sir Keir said the four-part series raises questions about how to keep young people safe from technology.

Previously it was thought they were more at risk outside their homes but that’s now being “overtaken by a greater danger, which is what’s happening in the home, what’s happening in the bedroom, in the places where they’re on their own,” the prime minister said.

He referred to real-life cases such as that of Kyle Clifford, the crossbow killer who watched misogynistic content before he murdered his ex-girlfriend and her mother and sister.

This type of violence against women “isn’t new” but Adolescence shows it has taken “different characteristics”, Sir Keir added.

‘No simple solution’

The meeting came as the government announced Netflix had made the show free to watch in all secondary schools across the country to help pupils understand “the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalisation and the importance of healthy relationships”.

Sir Keir said there is “no simple solution” or “policy lever to be pulled”, describing misogyny as “almost a cultural issue”.

He said the aim of the round table was to discuss “what can we do as a society to stop and prevent young boys being dragged into this whirlpool of hatred and misogyny”.

‘Brilliant meeting’

Speaking after the round table, Thorne told Sky News’ arts and entertainment correspondent Katie Spencer it was a “brilliant meeting”, with young people, charities, and representatives from Netflix also present.

“There needs to be more dialogue with people cleverer than me, that’s the big solution to this problem,” he said.

“It’s about putting money in, having conversations, creating an environment which is safer for our young people.”

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Adolescence topped the charts amid mounting concern over violent and sexist social media content being served up to teenagers, and calls for the government to get tough on tech firms.

Ministers have faced calls from MPs to take radical action such as raising the age of consent to use social media from 13 to 16 – something Thorne has previously backed.

Sports

Sources: Stanford hiring Reich as interim for ’25

Published

1 hour ago

March 31, 2025

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Sources: Stanford hiring Reich as interim for '25

Stanford is hiring veteran NFL coach Frank Reich as the school’s interim football coach for the 2025 season, sources told ESPN on Monday.

Both sides have agreed it will be only a one-season deal, sources told ESPN. Stanford will launch a national search to find a permanent replacement for fired coach Troy Taylor at the end of the 2025 season.

Taylor was fired last week amid findings by two outside firms that he had bullied and belittled female athletic staffers, sought to have an NCAA compliance officer removed after she warned him of rules violations and repeatedly made “inappropriate” comments to another woman about her appearance.

Stanford also is promoting tight ends coach Nate Byham to offensive coordinator, sources told ESPN. Byham will call plays for the Cardinal offense.

Reich’s hire is another significant move for Stanford football general manager Andrew Luck, who is believed to be the only collegiate general manager to have full control of the team’s coaching staff. Luck, the former Stanford and NFL quarterback, was hired in November in an effort to turn around the program at his alma mater, which hasn’t had a winning season since 2020.

Reich, 63, coached Luck during Luck’s final NFL season in 2018 and has a strong relationship with him.

Reich was fired by the Carolina Panthers in November 2023 after a 1-10 start to his only season with the team, becoming the first NFL head coach since the 1970 merger to be fired in back-to-back seasons after his 2022 dismissal from the Indianapolis Colts.

Reich, who has a career NFL coaching record of 41-43-1 over six seasons, went to four Super Bowls as a player with the Buffalo Bills, where he was primarily a backup. As an assistant coach, he won a Super Bowl with the Philadelphia Eagles after the 2017 season in which he was the offensive coordinator.

In 2017, Reich helped Carson Wentz go 11-2 with MVP-caliber numbers before a season-ending injury, and Nick Foles become the Super Bowl MVP in a 41-33 victory against the New England Patriots.

Reich also worked with future Hall of Fame quarterback Philip Rivers with the then-San Diego Chargers and the Colts.

Stanford hasn’t played in a bowl game since 2018. The interim hire comes in the wake of one of the program’s best players, David Bailey, entering the NCAA transfer portal.

ESPN’s David Newton, Kyle Bonagura and Xuan Thai contributed to this report.

Sports

What is a torpedo bat? How much does it help hitters? Inside MLB’s next big thing

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1 hour ago

March 31, 2025

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What is a torpedo bat? How much does it help hitters? Inside MLB's next big thing

EARLY IN THE 2023 season, Aaron Leanhardt started asking New York Yankees hitters what they needed to perform better. He was a minor league hitting coordinator for the team, and with league-wide batting average the previous year at its lowest point in more than a half-century, Leanhardt approached that spring with a specific question: How, in an era ruled by pitching, could offense keep up?

“Players were frustrated by the fact that pitching had gotten so good,” Leanhardt said.

An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems. And as he spoke with more players, the framework of a solution began to reveal itself. With strikeouts at an all-time high, hitters wanted to counter that by making more contact. And the easiest way to do so, Leanhardt surmised, was to increase the size of the barrel on their bat.

Elongating the barrel — the fat part of the bat that generates the hardest and most contact — sounded great in theory. Doing so in practice, though, would increase the weight of the bat and slow down swing speed, negating the gains a larger sweet spot would provide.

Leanhardt started to consider the problem in a different way. Imagine, he told players, every bat has a wood budget — a specific amount of weight (usually 31 or 32 ounces) to be distributed over a specific length. How could they invest a disproportionate amount of that budget on the barrel without throwing off the remainder of the implement?

The answer led to what could be the most consequential development in bat technology since a generation ago when players forsook ash bats for maple. The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin.

The bat had its big debut over the weekend, as the Yankees tied a major league record with 15 home runs over their first three games. Nine of those came from five Yankees who adopted the bowling pin style: Jazz Chisholm Jr. (three), Anthony Volpe (two), Austin Wells (two), Cody Bellinger (one) and Paul Goldschmidt (one). The hullaballoo over the bats started almost immediately after Yankees announcer Michael Kay noted their shape on the broadcast, and by the end of the weekend players around the league were inquiring to bat manufacturers about getting their hands on one.

The Yankees’ barrage of long balls permeated beyond players’ fascination and into the zeitgeist. Some fans and even opposing players wailed fruitlessly about the legality of the bats — Brewers reliever Trevor Megill called the bats “like something used in slow-pitch softball” after watching his teammates surrender home run after home run over the weekend. But the bats abide by Major League Baseball’s collectively bargained bat specifications for shape (round and smooth), barrel size (no larger than 2.61 inches in diameter) and length (a maximum of 42 inches). Most also didn’t realize that the bowlin -pin bat was used for some of the most consequential hits of 2024 thanks to one of its earliest adaptors.

Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton is owed as much credit as any player for the bowling pin revolution. Leanhardt’s logic behind the bat’s geometry made sense to Stanton, whose average bat velocity of 81.2 mph last year was nearly 3 mph ahead of the second-fastest swinger and more than 9 mph quicker than the average MLB swing. Even with outlier metrics, Stanton gladly embraced a bat that could make his dangerous swing even better — and used it while pummeling seven home runs in 14 postseason games.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW the bowling pin bat works is a lesson in physics. Take a sledgehammer and a broom handle. The sledgehammer will be more difficult to swing because much of its weight is distributed to the tip. The broom handle, meanwhile, can be swung with immense speed but doesn’t contain significant mass. If the length and weight of bats are constants, the distribution of mass is the variable — and Leanhardt conceived of a bat that optimizes both so it can do the most damage.

“This bat is just trying to say: What if we put the mass where the ball is going to hit so that we have an optimized equation of mass and velocity?” said Scott Drake, the president of PFS-TECO, a Wisconsin-based wood products laboratory that inspects all MLB bats to ensure they’re within the regulations. “You’re trying to take a sweet spot and put more mass with that.

“Wood is highly variable,” he added, “and everything is a trade-off.”

In the case of the bowling pin bat, it’s a trade-off hitters using it are willing to make. Because so much of the mass is in the barrel, swings that don’t connect on it produce results often more feeble than those of traditionally tapered models. As Leanhardt said, though, if a ball off the end of a bowling pin shape leaves the bat with an exit velocity of 70 mph compared to 71 mph for the traditional one, both are likely to result in outs. The difference between a 101 mph batted ball and 102 can be a flyout versus a home run.

“That’s the question of the whole wood budget,” said Leanhardt, who left the Yankees after serving as a major league analyst during the 2024 season and currently is the major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins. “Every penny counts. The fact of the matter is you want your barrels to count the most. You want the most bang for your buck there.”

Turning those principles into reality took buy-in from the entire bat supply chain. Once players bought into Leanhardt’s seedling of an idea, they requested samples from bat manufacturers. Leanhardt worked with a number of MLB’s 41 approved bat makers to make the idea real, and the spec bats were given model numbers that start with BP for bowling pin, though he admits that “torpedo sounds kind of cooler.”

Figuring out the right balance took time. Bowling pin bats take precision to produce. Every fraction of an ounce in bat manufacturing matters. Bats are measured not only on a standard scale but via pendulum-swing tests. The more balanced a bat, the more it oscillates. Traditional bats, their weight distributed disproportionately toward the end, didn’t go back and forth nearly as much.

With relatively lenient regulations from the league allowing manufacturers leeway to create products as long as they stay within the regulations, the new — and perhaps better — mousetrap was born. Stanton’s success was the ultimate proof of concept, and manufacturers came to spring training this year with bowling pin models for players to try in games.

“There’s new pitches getting invented every year,” said Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers, who used a bowling pin model in the first three games this year and went 1-for-8. “We’re just swinging the same broomstick we’ve swung for the last 100 years.”

Well, similar at least. Playing in an era when the average fastball velocity was an estimated 10 mph slower than the current average of around 95 mph, Babe Ruth swung a 36-inch, 44-ounce bat. As pitch velocity increased in the decades since, players shaved ounces off bats — tools to ensure they had the requisite speed to catch up with pitches.

“The bat is such a unique tool,” Jeffers said. “You look at the history of the game, and they used to swing telephone poles. Now you try to optimize it, and it feels like some branches are starting to fall for us on the hitting side of things.”

Jeffers, who has spent countless time searching for ways to counterbalance the technological revolution that helped create a generation of pitchers with the best stuff ever seen, swung a bowling pin model from manufacturer B45 in batting practice one day this spring and proceeded to order a batch that arrived during the final two weeks of spring training. Around the same time, Chisholm received his new bowling pin bats and was struck by how he couldn’t tell the difference from his traditional model.

“I mean, it still felt like my bat,” Chisholm told reporters Sunday, echoing Jeffers’ sentiment that bowling pin varieties swing similarly to their standard counterparts. “I hit the ball at the barrel, feel comfortable in the box. I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know the science of it, I’m just playing baseball.”

The science is multifold. Beyond the potential increases in exit velocity from the increased mass in the barrel, the weight distribution toward the knob should promote faster swings. Among the five Yankees who have used the bat, all have seen bat-velocity increases year over year, with Volpe up more than 3 mph, Bellinger up 2.5, Wells 2, Chisholm 1.1 and Goldschmidt — an inveterate tinkerer who has also used bats with hockey-puck-shaped knobs — 0.3 mph.

“Credit to any of the players who were willing to listen to me, because it’s crazy,” Leanhardt said. “Listening to me describe it is sometimes even crazier. It’s a long-running project, and I’m happy for the guys that bought into it.”

Because the data — on bat velocity as well as effectiveness — is of such a limited sample, nobody is yet proclaiming that the bowling pin bat will unquestionably revolutionize the game. But more bowling pins will be showing up in major league games soon. Leanhardt said his new team, the Marlins, will feature players using the bat in games. Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Junior Caminero laced an RBI single Sunday with a bowling pin model. In addition to the Yankees and Marlins, the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles are seen throughout the industry as the teams that have invested the most time and money researching bat geometry and optimization.

One player who does not plan on using the bowling pin model said multiple teammates plan to at least try one in batting practice after the Yankees’ nine-homer outburst Saturday. How many eventually adopt it as their full-time piece depends on feel as much as success. Comfort with a bat is vital for it to go from BP to a big league game, and in a sport where advantages don’t stay secret very long, New York’s might wind up lasting all of one weekend.

“There’s going to be a lot more teams wanting to swing them,” Jeffers said, “because of what the Yankees did this weekend.”