Outgoing Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher blames dysfunction on ‘lifers and careerists’

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who announced Saturday he would not seek reelection, blamed dysfunction in Congress on “lifers and careerists” in an interview Tuesday.

“[S]ince I ran, I always said that Congress shouldn’t be a career,” Gallagher said in an interview on “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News. 

“I think that the fact that we have so many lifers and careerists in this institution is why it’s so dysfunctional, and that the framers, when they created the Constitution and this country, had in mind that you would embark on a season of service and then return to private life,” Gallagher continued.

Gallagher’s words mirrored those he made in a statement Saturday on his decision to not run for reelection to Congress, in which he said the “Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives.”

“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Gallagher, the chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in his statement. “And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided not to run for re-election.”

The Wisconsin Republican was one of the three members of his party to vote against impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which he argued would have “opened Pandora’s box” in an op-ed.