In 2020, as Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers was preparing to launch her successful bid to be the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Washington state lawmaker asserted that the influential panel was where the GOP would win over “hearts and minds” — and find its path back to the majority.
She ultimately saw this prediction bear out, first with the House Republican takeover in 2022 and now with the party’s clean sweep of the House, Senate and presidency.
Yet rather than ride the red wave as part of a GOP governing trifecta — and enjoy the last two years of her three-term limit atop Energy and Commerce — McMorris Rodgers is instead getting ready to retire without concrete plans for her future.
She is doing so despite not having done all she set out to achieve, both in terms of legislation that has run up against opposition at the leadership level and personal pursuits to improve what she perceives as an increasingly dysfunctional legislative branch.
But while she made the decision back in February that 2024 would be her last year in Congress after two decades, before knowing the outcome of the elections, she insists she is “at peace” with the choice and proud of everything she has accomplished.
“It’s been the best. I’ve loved being chair of Energy and Commerce,” McMorris Rodgers, 55, reflected in a recent interview. “I gave a lot of thought and prayer to this decision not to run for reelection … Everyone says you’ll know it’s time, and it’s time … I’ve had amazing opportunities, and I feel like I’ve been blessed by God.”
She also feels heartened by the results of the election, which she believes reflects the resonance of “our message of the importance of energy security, and securing the border, and the rising costs of inflation driving up the cost of everything, the cost of health care.
“People voted and supported a lot of what we have been talking about” on the committee, she said.
Still, she is leaving behind unfinished business. As chair, McMorris Rodgers shepherded through H.R. 1, the House GOP’s sweeping vision for expanding domestic energy production. She’ll miss seeing components of it likely advance in the next Congress under unified Republican government.
It’s likewise far from certain she’ll be able to negotiate an agreement before the end of her tenure on a bicameral, bipartisan bill to streamline the permitting process for hydropower projects, which has long been at the top of her list.
McMorris Rodgers’ efforts to change how her Republicans colleagues address climate change and energy issues remains a work in progress, too.
In 2004, she was the 200th woman elected to the House of Representatives and went on, from 2013-2019, to lead the House Republican Conference. She was the first woman to serve as ranking member and chair of Energy and Commerce.
Channeling this trailblazing record, McMorris Rodgers worked for the better part of twenty years to compel her colleagues to adopt better message discipline and embrace policies that would grow the GOP tent.
As chair of Energy and Commerce, for instance, she said members were successful at “highlighting and reinforcing this idea that American energy solutions are climate solutions.”
But Republicans have continued to land on rhetorical minefields that cast them as out of touch with the broader base of voters McMorris Rodgers has always sought to court, including on issues like climate change.
And McMorris Rodgers herself has been undermined on more than one occasion, most recently by her own leadership over the fate of bipartisan data privacy legislation designed to protect children on the internet.
None of this has to do with her decision to leave office, she said — though she didn’t mince words.
“I am very concerned about the breakdown of trust, whether it is between a committee chairman and leadership or between an elected representative and the body and the people,” McMorris Rodgers said. “And I think people see too often elected representatives being focused on the wrong things. I’ll say that.”
‘Nothing is given to anybody’
McMorris Rodgers has always chafed at the suggestion her success in Congress has been due to her gender and the GOP’s desire to diversify its ranks.
In 2014, when McMorris Rodgers was selected to deliver the official Republican rebuttal to then-President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) quipped it was because “the Republican Party knows full well they are not a very diverse party.”
Rep. Diane Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, noted how she and McMorris Rodgers, who she called her “sister” and a “mentor,” would “chat sometimes” about the challenges women still face in politics, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle where they remain far outnumbered by men.
“It’s a good old boys system,” Harshbarger, “and for a woman to get to a level to have any authority and have authority in places where you can make a difference — in our case, in legislation — you have to be intelligent, hardworking and you have to put people on your side.”
McMorris Rodgers is fiercely defensive of the work she has had to do to get ahead — as a woman or otherwise.
“Nothing is given to anybody around here, whether you’re male or female. You work hard, build trust, build the relationships,” McMorris Rodgers told POLITICO’s E&E News.
“That really became clear when I became chair of Energy and Commerce — that was years of building trust, building relationships. … Over and over, my colleagues have told me, ‘I trust you. I may not agree with you all the time, but I trust you.’ I think the key for me has been building trust and being trustworthy at a time when not many are.”
Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee agree that McMorris Rodgers is a straight shooter whose good relationships with members of both parties and chambers has served her well.
It’s given her latitude to play hardball, said Rep. Jeff Duncan (R.S.C.), like when the Senate was trying to move legislation to improve access to nuclear energy that would have undermined a similar package her members were pursuing.
The result was enactment of the ADVANCE Act, landmark legislation that will jump-start a new generation of nuclear reactors.
“She empowered her team to negotiate” with counterparts in the Senate, said Duncan, the retiring Chair of the Energy, Climate and Grid Security Subcommittee and the lead sponsor of the original House nuclear bill. “But she also set parameters on what we needed … saying, ‘Here’s where we are. Here’s where they are. What are the priorities we want to fight for?'”
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), chair of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing and Critical Minerals, called McMorris Rodgers a “tough negotiator,” particularly when it came to getting a bill over the finish line that would require the popular social media platform TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership or face an effective ban in the United States.
“She wasn’t willing to give up,” said Carter. “A lot of people would have thrown their hands up and said, ‘I’m out of here,’ but she wasn’t one of those. She stuck in there, and we got the results that we hoped for.”
McMorris Rodgers held firm this summer when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) led opposition to legislative proposals to impose new privacy requirements for companies that collect people’s online data and prevent social media platforms from recommending certain content to minors.
Johnson and Scalise had problems with the bills and told McMorris Rodgers she should cancel a planned committee vote or risk seeing the bipartisan measures fail.
McMorris Rodgers refused to back down until five minutes before the markup was about to begin. At that time, rather than pull specific bills from the agenda, she postponed the entire business meeting, delaying action on not only the data privacy measure but close to a dozen other pieces of legislation, too.
“I think it’s very important for a committee chairman to defend the work of the committee, and whether it’s Republican or Democrat, I don’t believe it’s good when you have leadership writing bills,” said McMorris Rodgers.
“The legislative process is about committees doing the work, the hearings, the markups, and we had — I had done numerous hearings. We were working through markups. And that needs to be respected in this place.”
‘Very, very frustrating’
The breakdown with Johnson and Scalise, which occurred months after her announced plans to retire, provided a glimpse into McMorris Rodgers’ thinning patience with leadership and a fractious Republican Conference.
“You could see where she would get frustrated,” said Carter. “She was laser focused on getting end results, and quite often, particularly when you have a slim majority we have, it can be very, very frustrating.”
Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, a senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said she believed McMorris Rodgers was “really thwarted by the Republican leadership.”
There are signs McMorris Rodgers isn’t satisfied to leave behind an institution she sees in need of repair.
She said she’s been telling colleagues for months to appreciate their expanded policymaking authorities in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer to strike down a longstanding doctrine known as Chevron deference, which had for four decades given agencies more latitude than lawmakers to interpret and implement certain laws.
“Where I have been talking to members of the Energy and Commerce Committee and beyond is the importance of this moment, with the overturn of the Chevron doctrine. … Congress, in many ways, has deferred too much to the agencies,” said McMorris Rodgers.
She suggested, among other things, that Congress should take it upon itself to authorize the mandates of agencies like EPA that were created by presidents, not the legislative branch.
“President-elect Trump is putting in a lot of people who are going to be disruptors, so this is a time to rethink the federal government from top to bottom and Congress needs to be a part of that, make sure we are listening to the people we represent,” she continued. “Congress must listen to the people and make sure that we’re listening and then doing what they have sent us here to do.”
Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) acknowledged that McMorris Rodgers was a “true conservative” — indeed, she dedicated dozens of hearings over the last two years to undercutting what she called the “radical, rush-to-green” Biden climate agenda.
But, Pallone added, she also “always wanted to get things done” and honor “a history of bipartisanship” on the panel.
“She wanted to legislate,” he said. “The problem was, when we would work across the aisle and do things on a consensus basis and get them out of committee, oftentimes, the chaos of the leadership level got in the way.”
According to an analysis of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s work over the last Congress, there are currently 76 bills that passed out of the panel on a bipartisan bases — 46 of them unanimously — that are still awaiting action on the chamber floor.
McMorris Rodgers said she didn’t have plans yet for her next act, but it will involve being “more present with my husband and my kids.”
Her children are 17, 14 and 11. McMorris Rodgers, who said she “never, never” believed she’d serve on Capitol Hill as long as she has, still holds the distinction of being the only lawmaker to have ever given birth three times while serving in Congress.
“I’m exploring a lot of options,” she said. “I’m very passionate.”
Correction: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers was the first woman to serve as chair of the House Republican Conference. The first Republican woman to lead the conference was former Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio).
