Five months into the current Congress, only one member — Rep. Mike Waltz — has resigned, though he had a good excuse: The Florida Republican was offered an opportunity to serve as the White House national security adviser. (That did not turn out especially well for him.)
The resignation list, however, is poised to grow from one member to two. NBC News reported:
Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., said Monday that he will resign from Congress after it passes a massive policy bill to advance President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda. “It is with a heavy heart that I announce my retirement from Congress. Recently, I was offered an opportunity in the private sector that was too exciting to pass up,” Green said in a statement, adding that he notified Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., that he would vacate his seat after the House’s next vote on the legislative package that’s currently in the Senate.
All things considered, “retirement” wasn’t the best choice of words. Plenty of incumbent members have announced in recent months that they don’t intend to run for re-election next year, but the Tennessee Republican isn’t waiting nearly that long. Indeed, while it’s not yet clear exactly when the House might vote again on the GOP’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — once that happens, Green is walking away from Capitol Hill altogether.
In other words, it’s probably best to measure the remainder of his tenure in weeks, not months.
For those unfamiliar with the outgoing congressman, the Tennessean has a curious professional background. In 2017, for example, Donald Trump tapped Green — at the time, a GOP state senator — to serve as his secretary of the Army. As regular readers might recall, the political world soon learned about Green’s many strange beliefs: He’d argued that being transgender is a “disease,” promoted creationism, criticized public health care programs for interfering with Christian evangelism, and even raised some strange concerns about Victoria’s Secret catalogs.
A Slate report added that Green also “agreed with a questioner that President Obama is not a citizen and he refused to answer whether the former president is really a Muslim.”
As this information came to light, even some Senate Republicans raised concerns about his nomination, deeming the Tennessean a bit too radical to be confirmed, and on a Friday afternoon in May 2017, Green quietly withdrew from consideration.
A year later, he was elected to Congress.
After the 2022 midterm elections, GOP leaders thought it’d be a good idea to put him in charge of the House Homeland Security Committee, where he launched a crusade to impeach then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for reasons that still don’t make a lot of sense.
In February 2024, Green announced his retirement, insisting that Congress was “broken,” and it was “time for me to return home.” Two weeks later, Green changed his mind, un-retired, and proceeded with his re-election effort, telling local voters that he wanted to represent them again in the U.S. House. The GOP lawmaker’s constituents rewarded him with another term, which he’s now abandoning to pursue a private sector opportunity. Some of the relevant details are not yet available — we don’t know for certain, for example, when Green’s last day will be, or how long it will take to hold a special election to fill the vacancy — but once his resignation takes effect, the House Republican majority, which is already tiny, will shrink once again. The House GOP conference currently has 220 members. With Green out, it will be 219 members — one more than is usually necessary to pass legislation in the chamber. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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