Former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney will step away from his U.S. Senate seat after his term is over in January 2025. He will not seek re-election in 2024.
Over at Politico, Burgess Everett asks what Romney’s departure, and the potential departures of centrists Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, might mean for the “Senate middle.” Here is a taste:
And as maligned as Romney, Manchin and Sinema are by one party or the other’s faithful, the possible 2024 departures of two or three of them would change the Senate, which passed several notable bipartisan deals in the last Congress.
“You lose the center, you lose the moderates, you’re screwed. You really are screwed,” Manchin said in an interview. “I’m hoping the voters will wake up.”
It had become cliche to bemoan the Senate’s increasing partisanship over the past two decades, a period of fewer big bipartisan deals, endless procedural delays and episodes like the GOP’s 2016 Supreme Court blockade. Then, for two years under a 50-50 Senate, President Joe Biden found some legislative success by letting the chamber work its will.
A roving bipartisan group started on Covid aid in late 2020 and came together on big issues that had bedeviled previous Congresses: gun safety, same-sex marriage protection, microchip manufacturing and infrastructure investment. Democrats made their fair share of partisan moves, jamming through hundreds of billions in party-line dollars and a massive pandemic aid plan, but the Senate’s playing field was also open for centrist maneuvering.
These days, the House is run by Republicans in no mood to deal, and it’s hard for some to see the conditions of 2021 and 2022 returning anytime soon. That alone was enough for Romney to call it quits.
“That group was so productive. And it was so fun,” Romney said of his fellow Senate centrists in an interview on Wednesday. “That little group, I think, is not going to be around. And so, time for new groups to form.”
Every few years, the Senate undergoes sweeping changes due to retirements and lost reelection bids. Taken together, over time, they reshape the act of legislating in surprising ways. Some new senators step up to fill the voids, while other efforts disappear. As Romney sees it — and he’s not alone — the Senate’s current referendum on bipartisanship has three others at its “heart”: Sinema, Manchin and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a more progressive red-state dealmaker who faces a tough reelection campaign.
Read the rest here.