Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the longest serving member of Texas’ congressional delegation, announced Thursday that he will retire instead of running for re-election if new congressional district boundaries aren’t rejected in court, after state Republicans carved up his Austin-area home district in new maps.
While Austin is currently divided up into two districts represented by two Democrats, Doggett and Rep. Greg Casar, the new map combines those two districts to make one heavily Democratic seat and another that leans Republican and is more around San Antonio.
While Doggett had been telegraphing for weeks that he was planning to seek re-election for the blue seat in Austin, setting up a generational clash between the 78-year-old and the 36-year-old Casar, he’s now on course to retire instead, unless a court intervenes.
“If this racially gerrymandered Trump map is rejected, as it should be, I will continue seeking reelection in Congressional District 37 to represent my neighbors in the only town I have ever called home,” Doggett said in a statement. “If the courts give Trump a victory in his scheme to maintain control of a compliant House, I will not seek reelection in the reconfigured CD37.”
“I wish Congressman Casar the best,” Doggett concluded.
Doggett just hit his 30th year in the House of Representatives and his 52nd in Texas politics. He’s held important posts on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and other House committees with oversight over the economy and the federal budget.
Doggett was also the first Democratic member of Congress to call on then-President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race in 2024, doing so in early July, as his party raged over Biden’s poor debate performance in late June.
Before winning his House seat in 1994, Doggett served as a state Supreme Court Justice and a member of the state Senate. In 1979, he was one of the dozen “Killer Bees,” a nickname for the Democratic state senators who banded together to deny Republicans the minimum number of lawmakers required to conduct legislative business, also known as a “quorum,” a move that stymied Republican attempts to change the rules for presidential primaries in the state.
More recently, Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the state earlier this month to delay the GOP-backed redistricting law pointed to the “Killer Bees” when discussing the long history of quorum breaking in the state.
While Doggett has been a respected member of the delegation for decades, the decision by Republicans to redraw congressional maps in the hopes of padding their majority in Washington created an awkward situation for him and Casar, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus despite having served less than two full terms in Washington.
Doggett has spent weeks publicly cajoling Casar to run in the new 35th District, the redrawn district near San Antonio that President Donald Trump carried by about 10 percentage points last year. During an interview Wednesday on CNN, Doggett said he hoped that Casar wouldn’t “surrender [his district] to Trump.”
“I think the appeal that he’s carried around the country with Bernie Sanders, of appealing to disaffected Americans, particularly in Texas, disaffected Latinos, would be an important message to deliver there, and I hope we won’t see that kind of conflict that Republicans are always trying to encourage, where Democrats fight each other rather than fighting Trump,” he added.
Casar has been fiercely critical of the GOP’s new congressional map, but he hasn’t publicly weighed in about the possibility of a primary against Doggett in the same way.
And this week, a handful of Texas Democrats, including former gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis and former Texas Rep. Glen Maxey, wrote an op-ed in The Austin Chronicle calling on Doggett to “pass the torch to protect the progressive movement’s future,” warning that “ending the congressional career of an exceptional young congressional leader like Greg Casar would unavoidably cast a shadow over Doggett’s otherwise shining legacy.”
Melissa Frankel contributed.
