Hey, guys, it's Andrew Eger with the bulwark, author of our Morning Shots newsletter, joined today by Press Pass author, our congressional correspondent, Joe Perdicone, for a bulwark take. We're starting to see some Republicans run for the hills. Today, Republican Congressman Mark Amaday announced he'd be retiring from Congress at the end of this term. Amaday, who is Nevada's lone Republican in the state. He just won re-election in 2024 by a lot, almost 19 points. So it's not like it's not a very red district. He's also not the only guy. We're going to talk about a few of these people. But Joe, let's just start with Congressman Amaday. Why is he leaving? What's going on? The same reason they'll leave, you know, spend more time with the family. Noble reasons, of course. No, he's leaving, as are many others. And many are retiring not just to, you know, get out of politics, but also to pursue other offices back in their home states. Because it sucks being in the minority and they know that's

where it's headed. This is a pretty common trend. If you look at past election cycles,

these midterms where presidents, you know, fresh into their first arm, and I guess this case,

Trump's second, but it's his first. His second first term. His second, like, non-consecretive

one. It usually happens where the majority party in the house gets booted out. And so we saw in

2018, Republicans 39 of them retired in that cycle. Right now, Amode makes 31. So we still get a little more to go, but that's also not

including the five deaths or resignations. One of those was Mike Waltz to go be a very incompetent

cabinet official for Trump, and the other was Matt Gates, who couldn't become a cabinet official.

And then Marjorie Taylor Green left. Doug LaMalfa passed away.

Mark Green, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, decided to bounce.

And so, you know, there's a lot of people who just don't want to stick around because it's not fun when you go from having power in the majority to being powerless in the minority.

There's another layer of it too where they're in the majority now, but they don't really get to do anything that they want.

Trump is steering Congress more so than any president has really in history.

And so Mike Johnson does everything that Trump says,

and he doesn't allow anything that Trump won't allow. And so the House doesn't get to do anything.

You don't get to prioritize your little pet projects. Because a lot of these members of Congress,

they like to do things that are very specific to their interests, but when you have this paralyzed floor,

you have a very thin majority, so they're not having fun right now, and they know it's only

going to get worse when they're in the minority. So, you know, go find a job elsewhere. Go get

rich lobbying. There's a lot of things you can do when you come to the realization that you'll never be president.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me ask about one thing that might be a little bit different this cycle than in previous cycles.

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