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    For Dean Phillips, Biden’s Withdrawal Offers ‘Unfulfilling’ Vindication

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    For Dean Phillips, the modern Cassandra of American politics, this I-told-you-so moment brings no joy. A little vindication, yes. Sadness, too, and sympathy for a man who gave his life to public service and deserved a better finale.But when it comes down to it, Mr. Phillips did tell everyone so, even though no one listened. He said early and often that President Biden was too old to run again, that he could not win, that the Democrats should find someone else to lead them into the election. When no one else picked up the mantle, he tried himself, only to be alternately ignored or pilloried.So when Mr. Biden stunned the world by pulling out of the race on Sunday, it was a bittersweet moment. Mr. Phillips could tell himself that he had tried to warn the party and at least some people remembered. By the end of the day, his phone had blown up with 1,276 text messages. He could not help wondering what would have happened had Mr. Biden made this decision 18 months ago. “Vindication,” he said, “has never felt so unfulfilling.”The story of Dean Phillips certainly looks different today than it did even a month ago. Until the world saw a frail and fumbling president on the debate stage on June 27, Mr. Phillips was a little-known third-term congressman from Minnesota whose long-shot challenge of Mr. Biden in the Democratic primaries had been dismissed as a quixotic exercise. Now it looks a little more prophetic.The point, he said, was to raise the alarm, not to advance his own ambitions. “My mission was to be a Paul Revere, not a George Washington,” he said. “I think that’s been accomplished.”Mr. Phillips sat down at a Washington hotel on Sunday to discuss his journey just 90 minutes before Mr. Biden announced that he was pulling out. The congressman had just come from the studio of CBS News, where he appeared on “Face the Nation” and discussed his opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting a secret vote of confidence on the president by House Democrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marianne Williamson Suspends Her Long-Shot Challenge Against Biden

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      Marianne Williamson, the self-help author, is suspending her long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she said in a video address on Wednesday.Ms. Williamson on Tuesday placed a very distant third place in Nevada’s primary election, behind President Biden — who won nearly 90 percent of the vote — and behind “none of these candidates,” a ballot option that earned less than 6 percent of the vote. She had put significant effort into campaigning in the state before the primary, but ultimately drew under 3 percent of the vote.She also placed a very distant second in the South Carolina primary, with just over 2 percent of the vote, but she topped Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota — who had so far been Mr. Biden’s most significant rival.It was Ms. Williamson’s second attempt at running for president. She had earned some publicity early in the Democratic debates during her first run in 2020, but dropped out of the race before the first votes were cast.Ms. Williamson made it further this time, lasting through two official presidential primaries, as well as the unsanctioned New Hampshire primary that will award no delegates in the nominating contest. More

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      Running for President Is Not a Hobby

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      Think I have something good to report, people. No, it’s not about how to get your kids Taylor Swift tickets in Tokyo.My news is that Dean Phillips is not going to run as a third-party candidate for president.“No! No!” he assured me when I asked him the big question this week.OK, you’re thinking that you’ve had more thrilling news from the grocer on banana prices. But follow along for a minute.Phillips is a representative from Minnesota who campaigned very energetically in the New Hampshire presidential primary. People there were a tad piqued by the Democrats’ decision to move the first official party vote to South Carolina. Despite all that rancor, Phillips, who, unlike President Biden, was on the ballot, got about 24,000 votes to Biden’s nearly 80,000 write-ins.But he’s marching on. “Look at the data,” he said. (I discovered during our phone interview that Phillips says “Look at the data” a lot.) “I’m from the business world. It’s time to come out with a new product.”If you want to run for president and it doesn’t look as if your party is going to nominate you, you have two real choices. You can do what Phillips is doing: keep competing in the primaries and hope voters will embrace your message. Or you can get yourself on the ballot in November as a third-party candidate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Biden Wins New Hampshire Democratic Primary

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      President Biden won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, carried by his supporters’ write-in campaign after he declined to appear on the state’s ballot.The victory, called by The Associated Press, was good, if expected, news for Mr. Biden. But votes were still being counted, and the final margin of his win will be closely watched.As an incumbent president facing a list of long-shot challengers, anything short of a decisive victory would be perceived as bruising for Mr. Biden, even though he did not try to compete in the primary.Mr. Biden skipped the state after a dispute over the timing of its primary, as he and the Democratic National Committee sought to push New Hampshire’s contest later in the nominating process. Granite Staters, deeply protective of their first-in-the-nation tradition, refused to comply.His allies in the state eventually stepped in, and the write-in effort, supported by top Democrats there, generated the kind of grass-roots energy for Mr. Biden that has not yet materialized in other states — and that he did not enjoy in New Hampshire’s primary in 2020, when he came in fifth place.“Despite President Biden’s absence from the ballot, Granite Staters still turned out in robust numbers to show their support for the great work that the Biden-Harris administration has done,” Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party — and an ardent critic of the calendar changes — said in a statement, praising the success of the write-in campaign. “Once again, New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary made history — and we are proud as ever.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Dean Phillips Floats a No Labels Bid if 2024 Is Trump vs. Biden

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      Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, a Democrat running a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, said on Saturday that he would consider running on the ticket of No Labels, a centrist group exploring an independent bid, if it appeared the general election would be a rematch between Mr. Biden and Donald J. Trump.In an interview, Mr. Phillips publicly articulated for the first time the circumstances in which he would accept the No Labels presidential nomination, and said he was in regular communication with Nancy Jacobson, the group’s chief executive. Democratic allies of Mr. Biden have been alarmed by No Labels, worrying that any candidate it runs could siphon votes from him.“People are criticizing them because they believe whomever they offer on their ticket will hurt Joe Biden,” Mr. Phillips said after a town-hall event at a senior center in Nashua, N.H. “That’s false. If they put someone at the top of the ticket who could actually drive votes from Donald Trump, every Democrat in the United States of America should be celebrating it. They haven’t made that determination.”Mr. Phillips has a long relationship with Ms. Jacobson and No Labels from his tenure in the group’s congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, an organization that promotes policies with bipartisan support. He said he had told Ms. Jacobson he would not discuss running as the No Labels candidate “at this time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Dean Phillips Drops DEI From Campaign Website After Bill Ackman Donation

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      The campaign website for Representative Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Democrat mounting a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, has a policy platform that signals liberal bona fides tempered by a Midwestern businessman’s practicality. It includes headers like “Climate Action,” “Women’s Health and Economic Security” and “Immigration Reform.”Sometime on Tuesday, one header was changed. Gone was “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” In its place: “Equity and Restorative Justice.”The text beneath the header — including acknowledgments of racial disparities and vague promises to ensure equal opportunity — was untouched. But the tweak was nonetheless significant. Even more so was its timing: On Saturday, Mr. Phillips had received the endorsement of William A. Ackman, the billionaire investor who in recent months has become an outspoken critic of so-called D.E.I. programs in higher education.Mr. Ackman did not merely endorse Mr. Phillips; in a lengthy post on X on Saturday, where Mr. Ackman has a considerable following, he said that he had already given the maximum $3,300 donation allowed to Mr. Phillips’s campaign, and he announced that on Tuesday, after the federal holiday for Martin Luther King’s Birthday, he planned to wire $1 million to We Deserve Better, a super PAC formed late last year that is supporting Mr. Phillips’s candidacy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Dean Phillips, an Upstart Challenger to Biden, Embraces ‘Medicare for All’

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      A longtime moderate, the Democratic congressman now says he had been “convinced through propaganda” that calls for universal health care were “a nonsensical leftist notion.”As he mounts a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, Representative Dean Phillips says he has had an epiphany about American health care policy.Gone is his yearslong skepticism about adopting a national single-payer health care system. Now Mr. Phillips, a moderate Democrat from Minnesota, is embracing the “Medicare for all” proposal championed in two presidential campaigns by Senator Bernie Sanders — whose former top aide is now advising Mr. Phillips’s campaign.Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Tuesday that he would join as a co-sponsor to a House proposal that would expand Medicare by creating a national health insurance program available to all Americans, a shift that comes seven weeks into a presidential campaign that has yet to show significant progress in public polling.“I was a good example of someone who had been convinced through propaganda that it was a nonsensical leftist notion,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not. It really isn’t. And that’s I think that’s part of my migration, if you will, a migration of understanding and due diligence and intellectual curiosity and most importantly, listening to people.”Embracing the House bill is a low-stakes maneuver. With Republicans in control of the chamber, there is little chance it will come to a vote. Even when Representative Nancy Pelosi of California was speaker, Democrats never held a vote on proposals for Medicare for all that were championed by their progressive caucus — largely because President Biden didn’t support such a move, and centrist Democrats believed it was a bridge too far.Mr. Phillips — who spoke in the interview by videoconference, from an onscreen profile identifying him as “Generic Democrat” in a sly nod to the party’s best performer in polls — argued that his recent evolution on health care was not an effort to outflank Mr. Biden from the left.Instead, he said, he has become convinced that expanding Medicare, the government-run insurance program for older people, to cover all Americans would end up saving the federal government money and should attract support not just from progressives but also from conservatives — including backers of former President Donald J. Trump.“This is not a Hail Mary, by any stretch,” Mr. Phillips said. “It’s not an olive branch to progressives. You know what it really is? It’s an invitation to Trumpers.”Mr. Biden’s campaign spokesman, Kevin Munoz, declined to comment about Mr. Phillips.Mr. Phillips, a businessman who grew wealthy helping to run his family’s liquor distilling empire and later helped build a gelato behemoth, is a former board chairman of Allina Health, one of Minnesota’s largest health care systems. He said his beliefs began to change about 10 years ago, when his daughter Pia, then 13, received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he saw “the gaps between the haves and the have-nots.”In July 2020, as a first-term congressman, he embraced a “state public option” that would allow Americans to buy into Medicaid. More recently, he said, he has been consulting with Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who is a lead sponsor of the House Medicare for all bill, backed by more than half of House Democrats.Mr. Biden has moved the Democratic conversation about health care away from the idea of a single-payer plan, focusing instead on narrower issues like lowering drug costs and improving maternal health.“This is not a serious proposal in today’s environment,” Leslie Dach, the chair of the health advocacy group Protect Our Care and a former Obama administration official, said of Mr. Phillips’s switch. “We’re living in an era where it takes all of our energy to protect what we have from Republicans in Congress.” Mr. Phillips has not gained much traction. A poll last month from CNN and the University of New Hampshire found that he had support from about 10 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, the only state where he has a campaign apparatus. Mr. Biden’s name will not be on the ballot there, but the same CNN poll found that 65 percent of voters said they would write in his name.Mr. Phillips said he hoped to do well in New Hampshire before moving on to Michigan, where Mr. Biden’s approval ratings in recent polls have taken a hit from Black and Arab American voters who disapprove of his support for Israel in its war against Hamas.But Mr. Phillips offered little in the way of daylight between himself and Mr. Biden on that conflict, which has left Democratic voters fiercely divided. The congressman said that he would not call for an immediate cease-fire and that he did not consider Israel “an apartheid state,” as many on the left argue.Yet Mr. Phillips contended that Democrats were so disenchanted with Mr. Biden that when presented with another option, they would take it. “The good news is that 66 percent of the country does not yet hate me,” Mr. Phillips said, in a dig at the president’s dismal approval ratings. “America has already made up its mind about President Biden and Vice President Harris.” More

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      Annoyed at Biden, New Hampshire Democrats Aim to Help His Presidential Campaign

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      Despite being bumped down the presidential calendar, Democrats in the state are planning a write-in campaign for the president, who won’t be on New Hampshire primary ballots.New Hampshire Democrats were furious at President Biden when he shook up the party’s nominating calendar last year, diminishing their state’s political importance by pushing its primary election behind South Carolina’s.Kicking and screaming, they defied the Democratic National Committee and refused to move back their primary. This year, they warned that the upheaval could come back to haunt Mr. Biden and cause him an embarrassing loss in the state’s primary.In turn, the national party stripped the state of its delegates. Mr. Biden declined to campaign in New Hampshire or even place his name on the ballot.Now a range of the state’s influential Democrats, including Senator Jeanne Shaheen, are coming around to the idea that they need to swallow their pride and help Mr. Biden win their primary despite his snub of their state.“It’s up to us in New Hampshire to fix a problem that his advisers and the D.N.C. made for the president,” said Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman who is leading a write-in Biden super PAC.Ms. Sullivan’s super PAC is one of two groups of Democrats in the state organizing campaigns to promote Mr. Biden as a write-in candidate in the Jan. 23 primary election.For the Biden-backing Granite Staters, the write-in efforts amount to a bit of a tail-between-their-legs moment after months of howling objections about the president’s decision. Like Ms. Sullivan, they find themselves blaming the D.N.C. or Mr. Biden’s aides rather than a president whom they still support.Their goal is a substantial Biden victory over the two Democrats running protest campaigns against the president, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help author Marianne Williamson. Both of them, unlike Mr. Biden, will appear on Democratic ballots in the state.“People here, quite frankly, don’t care about the D.N.C. or their rules,” said Terie Norelli, a former speaker of the New Hampshire State House and a leader of Granite State Write-In, a grass-roots group supporting Mr. Biden. “The vast majority of Democrats and independents in New Hampshire do support President Biden.”The group hopes to use its modest budget — $50,000 to $70,000 — to inform New Hampshire Democrats and independents, who are allowed to cast ballots in the state’s primary elections, about how to vote for the president in a contest in which he is not participating.Beyond obvious details, like making sure voters know that his name is spelled B-i-d-e-n and that they have to check a write-in box on the ballot, the group is recruiting a team of volunteers. They will partake in the small-town New Hampshire experience of standing outside voting sites and holding signs urging voters to write in Mr. Biden’s name.The group also plans to have its members write letters and place opinion essays in New Hampshire newspapers and appear at town Democratic club meetings before the primary.Ms. Norelli said she was not worried that Mr. Biden would lose to Mr. Phillips or Ms. Williamson. The aim, she said, is to give his campaign — with which her group is not coordinating — momentum to defeat former President Donald J. Trump in the general election, assuming he is the Republican nominee.“It’s not like it’s a big, contested race,” she said.This month, the group distributed stickers at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fund-raising dinner where, in a public-relations triumph for the effort, Ms. Shaheen, the state’s senior senator, expressed her support.“Let’s kick off 2024 by writing in Biden and making our first-in-the-nation primary the very first victory for the Biden-Harris re-election team,” Ms. Shaheen said at the dinner.Representative Ro Khanna of California, who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions of his own and has publicly lamented Democrats’ decision to place New Hampshire after South Carolina on the nominating calendar, dialed into one of the group’s video conferences, which Ms. Norelli said were held every two weeks and usually attracted about 85 people.A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment.Florida’s Democratic Party has already canceled its presidential primary. Democratic officials in other states have moved to list only Mr. Biden on their ballot, which has led to complaints from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson.Ms. Sullivan said that by all but ignoring the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Biden ran the danger of allowing the challenges from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson to become competitive. She pointed to 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbent presidents lost re-election, and to 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven out of the race. In all of those years, the presidents faced tough primary opponents in New Hampshire.“I don’t think it would be good for him if he does poorly in New Hampshire,” Ms. Sullivan said of Mr. Biden.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said Mr. Biden retained support from a vast majority of the state’s Democrats, but cautioned that a significant percentage would be likely to vote against him.“About one-third of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters are cranky people who always want to be contrary,” said Mr. Buckley, who added that he had not communicated with the write-in groups. “Anyone who is not the main person starts off with a third of the vote.”Mr. Buckley himself plans to stay neutral — sort of.“Ever since I became state party chair, I have consistently written in Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Buckley said. “Maybe this time I’ll write in Rosalynn to honor her. That’s really the choice for me.”Lou D’Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator who has known Mr. Biden for decades, said he would reluctantly write the president’s name on the ballot despite lingering anger about how the Granite State had been treated.“People felt slighted,” he said. “But what he’s done for the country overrides that decision.”Mr. D’Allesandro said he saw Mr. Biden last week at a Boston fund-raiser where the musician James Taylor played a concert. Mr. D’Allesandro said that he had embraced Mr. Biden, and that the president had invited him to the White House.But Mr. D’Allesandro didn’t bring up his grievances about New Hampshire’s primary.“It wasn’t the time or the place to do that,” he said. More

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      More Members of Congress Are Retiring, Many Citing Dysfunction

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      More than three dozen incumbents have announced they will not seek re-election next year. Some are running for other offices, while others intend to leave Congress altogether.Eleven are running for the Senate. Five for state or local office. One for president of the United States. Another is resigning to become a university president. And more and more say they are hanging up their hats in public office altogether.More than three dozen members of Congress have announced they will not seek re-election next year, some to pursue other offices and many others simply to get out of Washington. Twelve have announced their plans just this month.The wave of lawmakers across chambers and parties announcing they intend to leave Congress comes at a time of breathtaking dysfunction on Capitol Hill, primarily instigated by House Republicans. The House G.O.P. majority spent the past few months deposing its leader, waging a weekslong internal war to select a new speaker and struggling to keep federal funding flowing. Right-wing members have rejected any spending legislation that could become law and railed against their new leader for turning to Democrats, as his predecessor did, to avert a government shutdown.The chaos has Republicans increasingly worried that they could lose their slim House majority next year, a concern that typically prompts a rash of retirements from the party in control. But it is not only G.O.P. lawmakers who are opting to leave; Democrats, too, are rushing for the exits, with retirements across parties this year outpacing those of the past three election cycles.And while most of the departures announced so far do not involve competitive seats, given the slim margins of control in both chambers, the handful that provide pickup opportunities for Republicans or Democrats could help determine who controls Congress come 2025.“I like the work, but the politics just no longer made it worth it,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview. He announced his retirement last month after more than a quarter-century in the House.“I think I can have more impact on a number of things I care about if I’m not going to be bogged down for re-election,” Mr. Blumenauer said.Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon, is retiring after more than 25 years in the House. “I like the work, but the politics just no longer made it worth it,” he said.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesAs lawmakers consider their futures in Congress, they are weighing the personal sacrifice required to be away from loved ones for much of the year against the potential to legislate and advance their political and policy agendas. In this chaotic and bitter environment, many are deciding the trade-off is unappealing.This session, said Representative Dan Kildee, Democrat of Michigan, has been the “most unsatisfying period in my time in Congress because of the absolute chaos and the lack of any serious commitment to effective governance.”Mr. Kildee, who has served in Congress for a decade, said he decided not to seek re-election after recovering from a cancerous tumor he had removed earlier this year. It made him re-evaluate the time he was willing to spend in Washington, away from his family in Michigan.The dysfunction in the House majority only made the calculation easier.“That has contributed to the sense of frustration,” he said, “and this feeling that the sacrifice we’re all making in order to be in Washington, to be witness to this chaos, is pretty difficult to make.”Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, also announced she would end her three-decade career in Congress at the close of her current term. One of her closest friends in Congress, Representative Zoe Lofgren, another California Democrat, told her hometown news site, San Jose Spotlight, that there was speculation that Ms. Eshoo was leaving “because the majority we have now is nuts — and they are.” But Ms. Lofgren added that “that’s not the reason; she felt it was her time to do this.”Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, also announced she would end a three-decade career in Congress.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSome House Republicans have reached the limits of their frustration with their own party.Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, announced he would not seek re-election after his dissatisfaction and sense of disconnect with the G.O.P. had grown too great. Mr. Buck, who voted to oust Representative Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, has denounced his party’s election denialism and many members’ refusal to condemn the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.“We lost our way,” Mr. Buck told The New York Times this month. “We have an identity crisis in the Republican Party. If we can’t address the election denier issue and we continue down that path, we won’t have credibility with the American people that we are going to solve problems.”Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona, said in a statement during the speaker fight last month that she would not run again.“Right now, Washington, D.C., is broken; it is hard to get anything done,” she said.The trend extends even to the most influential members of Congress; Representative Kay Granger, the 80-year-old Texas Republican who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, announced she would retire at the end of her 14th term. Even if her party manages to keep control of the House, Ms. Granger, the longest-serving G.O.P. congresswoman, faced term limits that would have forced her from the helm of the spending panel.Few of the retirements thus far appear likely to alter the balance of power in Congress, where the vast majority of House seats are gerrymandered to be safe for one party or the other. Prime exceptions include Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, whose retirement will almost certainly mean that Republicans can claim the state’s Senate seat and get a leg up to win control of that chamber.The decision of Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, to leave her seat in a competitive Virginia district to seek the governorship also gives Republicans a prime pickup opportunity.Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat leaving her Virginia seat to seek the governorship, gives Republicans a prime pickup opportunity. But most retiring lawmakers are in safe seats.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAnd Representative George Santos, Republican of New York, announced he would not seek re-election after a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that he had violated federal law. His exit will give Democrats a chance to reclaim the suburban Long Island seat he flipped to the G.O.P. last year.Many others are likely to be succeeded by members of their own party.Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, who last month announced a long-shot bid to challenge President Biden for his party’s nomination, said this week that he would step aside to focus on that race. Mr. Biden won his district by 21 percentage points in 2020, according to data compiled by Daily Kos, making it all but certain that Democrats will hold the seat.Representative Bill Johnson, Republican of Ohio, said he would accept a job as president of Youngstown State University. His seat, too, is all but sure to be held by the G.O.P.; former President Donald J. Trump won the district by more than 28 percentage points in 2020.Some members not seeking re-election have determined they can affect more change from outside Congress, where they do not have to contend with the same infighting, gridlock and attention-seeking that now frequently drive the place.“I think I will have as much or more impact as a civilian as I would as a member of Congress, especially having to be involved in a pretty toxic political environment,” Mr. Blumenauer said.Lawmakers typically do not choose to leave office when their party looks poised to regain power in the next election cycle, and Democrats see an opening to regain the House majority next year. But Mr. Blumenauer, who would be a senior member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee should his party win the House, said he would rather not sacrifice time with his family.“It’s tempting,” said Mr. Blumenauer. “I’m going to continue working on the things I care about, but with a renewed commitment to family, friends and fun.”Robert Jimison More