© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Chairman U.S. Consultant Mike Gallagher (R-WI) speaks with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former CIA director and former protection secretary Leon Panetta, throughout a listening to of the Home Choose Committee on the Strategic Competitio
By Patricia Zengerle
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Consultant Mike Gallagher, who chairs the Home choose committee on competitors with China, stated on Saturday he is not going to run for re-election, 4 days after he was one in every of solely 4 Home Republicans to buck occasion management and vote towards impeaching President Joe Biden’s high border official.
Gallagher, 39, a four-term Home member and former Marine Corps intelligence officer, issued a press release noting that the authors of the U.S. Structure had not supposed elective workplace to be for a lifetime.
“Electoral politics was by no means presupposed to be a profession and, belief me, Congress is not any place to develop previous. And so, with a heavy coronary heart, I’ve determined to not run for re-election,” he stated within the assertion.
Gallagher on Tuesday joined three different Republican Home members in voting towards impeaching Homeland Safety Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. As the trouble failed by one vote, Gallagher was surrounded on the Home ground by members of his occasion urging him to flip his vote.
Gallagher stated in a Wall Road Journal opinion piece afterward that impeachment wouldn’t solely fail to resolve issues on the border with Mexico however “additionally set a harmful new precedent that might be used towards future Republican administrations.”
Gallagher, a member of each the Home Armed Companies and intelligence committees, has spent a lot of his time this yr chairing the Choose Committee on the Chinese language Communist Celebration, a bipartisan panel charged with investigating U.S. relations with China and creating methods to assist enhance the nation’s capability to compete with China.
Republicans fashioned the choose committee after they took management of the Home in January 2023, a part of an effort to lift consciousness about points behind rising tensions with China. A tough line towards China is among the few insurance policies with bipartisan assist within the deeply divided U.S. Congress and Gallagher has been praised for easily working with Democrats on the panel.
