Corker, Duncan quoted in report on ‘bumper crop’ of retiring congressmen

In an article on the two dozen members of Congress who are retiring this year, Politico suggests that unhappiness with the current political environment is a factor – and quotes two departing Tennessee politicians in the process.

People retire every cycle. But this year’s group is a bumper crop of members wondering whether Congress is broken forever—even as they insist they love their own jobs.

The ferocity of the Gingrich Revolution, President Bill Clinton’s impeachment—even the Tea Party shutdown wars of 2011 and 2013 seem like the good old days to them now. Capitol Hill is an angry, scattered mess; each party is storing up grudges to get revenge for the next time it gets the chance; and the victories are always fleeting. When pressed, the departees will confess to deep concerns that flow from Trump, the reaction to Trump, and the politics that created and elected Trump.

“I’ve never experienced as much anger and hatred as I did in the first few months of [2017],” says Representative John Duncan, an affable ultraconservative Republican from Knoxville, Tennessee, who is retiring after 30 years in the House.

… Bob Corker, the retiring senator from Tennessee, stresses that he is leaving for his own reasons, and despite his public fights with Trump, says he was very comfortable with his chances for reelection. He cherishes his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and insists the Senate was broken years before Trump. “There’s going to be additional glass-breaking,” he says. And until we have “a president committed to wanting strong bipartisan legislation,” very little will change.