One House member who spent a long spell as a congressional staffer is set to depart Capitol Hill, while a first-term lawmaker who previously served as a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz is gaining national attention in his own right.
Rep. Rob Woodall will retire from the House after 2020, capping 10 years in office for the Georgia Republican. Prior to his election, he worked as press secretary and adviser for his Atlanta-area predecessor, then-Rep. John Linder.
Rep. Chip Roy, meanwhile, is in the dawn of his congressional career. The Texas Republican in 2018 won his race to represent Texas’ 21st Congressional District, stretching from north of San Antonio to Austin. He returned to Washington following tenures as Sen. John Cornyn’s staff director, senior counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Cruz’s chief of staff.
The path from staffer to member of Congress is well-trodden. Several lawmakers from both parties have made the leap over the years. But it’s not necessarily a credential to tout in the age of President Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra.
For Roy, it’s still an adjustment.
“At a personal level, going from staff to member, the hardest thing is to not staff yourself. I drive my staff crazy because I expect certain things,” Roy, 46, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s the hardest part: try to just turn the keys over to that and just go do my job.”
But the former federal prosecutor, who replaced longtime Rep. Lamar Smith in a closer-than-expected contest last cycle and made headlines in May for temporarily blocking the passage of a $19.1 billion disaster relief package, said he’s still sometimes caught off-guard in his current role.
“I was surprised at how much, on the day after the election and ever since in the last seven months, everything has been about regaining power and fundraising,” Roy said. “Every strategic conversation, every conversation that has involved leadership, every discussion that involves the group, it’s about regaining control of the House and fundraising to do it. It’s not about winning the argument.”
Roy is among a cadre of lawmakers who previously served in other capacities, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, Republican Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin. The revolving door also swings the other way, with former Republican Rep. Van Hilleary of Tennessee, and former Democratic Rep. Ron Barber of Arizona, coming back to Capitol Hill for the 116th Congress to work as chiefs of staff to Reps. John Rose and Ann Kirkpatrick respectively.
Woodall, the Georgia congressman, said he “underestimated” the personal challenge posed by not being able to please all of his stakeholders.
“As a staffer, you fight to defend your member, you only work for one person, and you’re fighting to protect and serve that one person. As a member of Congress, you have 700,000 bosses back home that you’re fighting to protect,” he told the Washington Examiner. “As a legislative director, you can succeed every day of the week. As a member of Congress, you’re going to disappoint every day of the week. That’s the nature of the game.”
Woodall, 49, also pushed back on the idea that a staff-to-lawmaker nexus perpetuates the D.C. the “swamp” of insiderism and government careerists.
“When you’ve worked on Capitol Hill as long as I had, you can’t pretend not to be part of the problem, for lack of a better word. But being part of the problem also means knowing a lot about how to fix the problems,” Woodall said. “And while there are lots of negative campaign ads that can be run, lots of 30-second ads that can be run on you’re part of the problem, at the end of the day, constituents just want results.”
