Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said this week he will retire from Congress after 26 years.
Thornberry announced Monday he would not stand for re-election in 2020, but will serve out the remainder of his term, slated to end Jan. 3, 2021. He will leave Congress after reaching perhaps the zenith of his influence as a member of the House GOP Conference, which limits its members to three consecutive terms as a committee leader.
Thornberry is now in his third term as the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, which sets policy and spending limits for Department of Energy defense nuclear programs each year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. His 13th Congressional District covers a key site in the DOE nuclear complex: the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Pantex Plant weapons assembly hub.
The second-highest-ranking Republican on the committee also has a major Energy Department nuclear constituency: Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), whose 2nd District covers the Savannah River Site. The Aiken, S.C., campus includes the NNSA’s tritium processing facilities. The agency also wants to build a plutonium pit production plant at Savannah River on the site of the canceled, partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
After Wilson, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) is next in seniority among Armed Services Republicans. Turner does not have a nuclear site in his district, but he is the current ranking member on the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee: the panel that writes the first draft of the nuclear portions of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Thornberry assumed the chairmanship of the full Armed Services Committee in 2015 and remained the panel’s top-ranking Republican after Democrats won the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections. In his time at the helm, he helped shepherd through the Barack Obama administration’s 30-year nuclear arsenal modernization and maintenance plan, and the Donald Trump administration’s relatively modest additions to it: development of the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, and an extended round of life support for the B83 megaton-class gravity bomb.
Thornberry was first elected to the House in 1994, six years before Congress created the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to oversee DOE’s active nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs.
In his statement Monday, Thornberry gave no reason for his planned departure.
“It has been a great honor to serve the people of the 13th District of Texas as their congressman for the last 25 years,” Thornberry wrote. “They have given me opportunities to serve the nation in ways I could have never imagined, including as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“We are reminded, however, that ‘for everything there is a season,’ and I believe that the time has come for a change. Therefore, this is my last term in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Texas’ 13th Congressional District is reliably Republican. The former Hill staffer turned member wrested Texas’ 13th District from Democrats in a 1994 election that was not especially close. He has held it since, winning each election by wide margins.
Thornberry most recently won re-election in 2018 with about 80% of the district’s registered voters: the same percentage of the Texas 13th’s electorate that in 2016 pulled the lever for now-President Donald Trump.
