Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher.
Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher drew worldwide attention in December 2022 when he was appointed chair of a new select committee on U.S.-China relations.
He had only been in the U.S. House for 17 months, but Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher knew how he would fix the grandstanding, gridlock and dysfunction in Congress: Term limits. End Congressional pensions. A “five-year or lifetime” ban on ex-members becoming lobbyists. Keep the House in session until major bills are debated and passed. Limit the number of recesses, when members end negotiations to resolve controversy and fly back home.
Those would “change the incentive structure in Congress, get past this endless careerism and endless campaigning that make it very difficult to get anything done,” Gallagher said in a WisconsinEye interview in May 2018.
“Everyone talks about, ‘We gotta do this, we gotta do that,’ and then everyone goes home and the [issues] remain unsolved. The problems just get worse and worse over time.”
And, Gallagher added, don’t govern by social media. “Twitter is making everybody stupid, including myself, so I think we should spend less time on it.” And, yes, that advice applied to the leader of his party, then-President Donald Trump.
Gallagher also admitted he was naive when he ran for Congress in 2016. “I underestimated how divisive the current moment is, and how difficult it is to get anything done in D.C. It’s so hard to disrupt or challenge the status quo.”
Gallagher’s 2018 remarks help explain why, six years later, he will not seek a fifth term representing northeast Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District. His surprise decision means Washington — and Wisconsin — is losing a “GOP rising star and China watchdog,” the Wall Street Journal said.
But, in a Feb. 10 post on X, Gallagher said he will be out of politics before he turns 40. “Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old.”
The Green Bay native’s official resume says the ex-Marine served two Iraq deployments and led a key U.S. Senate committee’s Republican staffers on Middle East and counterterrorism issues. He has two master’s degrees and a doctorate in foreign relations.
Washington politics got much louder, much uglier and much more divisive during Gallagher’s eight years in the House. He voted with most other House Republicans against impeaching Trump, who House Democrats tried to remove from office in 2019 and 2021, and voted against creating the U.S. House panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the Capitol.
On Jan. 6, 2021, an emotional Gallagher Twitter post went global. The ex-Marine and intelligence officer, from his Capitol office turned bunker, pleaded with Trump to “call this off…We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now.”
Gallagher drew worldwide attention in December 2022, when then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy named him chair of a new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
The appointment came months after Gallagher, at the annual state Republican Party convention, bluntly told delegates what was at stake in U.S-China relations: “The biggest long-term challenge we face is China. We’re in the early stages of a new cold war, and we’re currently losing…I believe we’re going to see a confrontation over Taiwan within the next four years.”
Under Democratic President Joe Biden, American foreign policy went from “peace through strength” to “chaos through weakness,” Gallagher explained. America’s abandonment of Afghanistan was a “complete and total disaster,” for example.
“Think about the message that sent around the world: We abandoned Americans, Americans behind enemy lines. You don’t think our enemies took notice of that? You don’t think that had a negative consequence on our positions in Eastern Europe, and in the Pacific? It did.”
The U.S. is losing the cold war with China because “American dollars — capital — is continuing to flow” to Chinese technology, its defense industry and biotech companies, Gallagher said, adding, “We’re funding things in China that are being built to kill Americans in a future conflict. That has to stop.”
Gallagher announced his retirement three days after his vote blocked the first attempt by House Republican leaders to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. House Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas one week later; Gallagher again voted no.
But Gallagher had signaled his retreat from politics for years. Married with two young daughters, his latest “deployment” to an unfriendly region — Congress — had to end.
Steven Walters started covering the Capitol in 1988. Contact him at stevenscotwalters@gmail.com.
