Representative Mike Gallagher, R-Wisconsin, announced Saturday that he will not seek re-election, days after breaking with his party to vote decisively against the impeachment charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary.
Mr. Gallagher, who is serving his fourth term in Congress, joins dozens of other lawmakers who have decided to resign. But the timing of his decision was striking, following the impeachment vote — which had already won him over as a primary challenger — and his relative youth, compared to others planning to retire from Congress.
“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, believe me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Mr. Gallagher, 39, said in a statement, adding that he had made the decision not to run “with heavy heart .”
Mr. Gallagher, a Marine Corps veteran and former congressional staffer, was an influential voice in the House when it came to national security and military issues. He was particularly outspoken on the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as on cyber security, having co-chaired an intergovernmental panel on the issue early in his congressional career.
Last year, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tapped him to lead a new committee tasked with investigating threats from the Chinese Communist Party, he was the youngest Republican to hold the committee’s chairman’s gavel.
Mr. Gallagher also caught the eye of Senate Republicans, who tried last year to get him to run against Senator Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin. But Mr Gallagher decided not to nominate her, announcing at the time that he would seek re-election to Parliament.
But his position in the GOP appeared to have changed earlier this week after he became the third House Republican to decline to support the impeachment effort against Mr. Mallorca. The charges, of refusing to obey the law and breach of public trust, were widely dismissed by legal experts as falling short of the constitutional threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The attempt to impeach Mr. Mallorca failed by just one vote.
“The impeachment proponents have failed to argue how his stunning incompetence meets the threshold for impeachment,” Mr. Gallagher said in a statement this week defending his decision, arguing that Mr. Mallorca’s impeachment would “create a dangerous new precedent to arm against future Republican administrations.”
The House is expected to try to impeach Mr. Mayorkas again next week, once Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican who was absent while undergoing treatment for blood cancer, returns to Washington.
Mr. Gallagher did not say exactly what he planned to do next, although he indicated that his next role would also be in the area of national security.
“Although my title may change, my mission will always be the same,” he said in a statement. “Deter America’s Enemies and Defend the Constitution.”
