Former House members, even those with relatively short careers on Capitol Hill, once out of office usually make a beeline for lucrative lobbying or consulting jobs.
Former Rep. Jim Bunn took a different route. After the Oregon Republican lost his first reelection bid amid scandal in 1996, he went to work as a prison guard for Yamhill County in the exurban Portland district he once represented.
Now Bunn is seeking a Capitol Hill comeback, running to represent the state’s new 6th Congressional District, election filings show.
Bunn was a member of Oregon’s Senate beginning in 1987. He was elected to Congress in 1994, the year of the Republican Revolution, when GOP lawmakers won their first House majority in 40 years.
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But Bunn’s Capitol Hill career didn’t last long. He made headlines shortly after his election when he divorced his wife of 17 years, with whom he shared five children — that after running on a conservative, family values platform.
Bunn proceeded to marry his aide, whom he had made his chief of staff and paid the highest salary of any congressional staff member in the Oregon delegation. Bunn lost reelection in 1996 to Democratic Rep. Darlene Hooley, who went on to a 12-year House career.
Bunn took an unorthodox route after leaving office, becoming a sheriff’s deputy at the Yamhill County Jail, working as a guard. When Portland outlet the Willamette Week interviewed Bunn in 2001, he said working as a jail guard had changed his view of the criminal justice system and given him more sympathy for the factors that lead people to trouble with the law. He also said a political comeback was on his heart but not his timeline.
“I would like to serve again sometime, but there is no timeline, no plan,” he said. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but it is not something that’s on my immediate agenda.”
The 2022 elections in Oregon are a 1990s revival for more than just Bunn. As the Oregon Capital Chronicle put it, “The dream of the ‘90s is alive in the Republican primary for governor, which has no clear frontrunner and has become a Who’s Who of all-but-forgotten figures from the GOP’s past.”
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The open election has 41 candidates, including Bill Sizemore, the Republican nominee in 1998, and a former state GOP chair from the same era.
