Trump Loses His Lone Black Republican Face in the House as Texas Rep. Will Hurd Announces Retirement

Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), one of the few dissenting Republican voices against the president and the lone black Republican in the House of Representatives, announced Thursday night that he will not seek reelection in 2020.

“I have made the decision to not seek reelection for the 23rd Congressional District of Texas in order to pursue opportunities outside the halls of Congress to solve problems at the nexus between technology and national security,” Hurd said on Twitter.

From the Hill:

Hurd’s abrupt decision to not seek reelection comes amid a period of flux inside the Republican Party. He becomes the sixth GOP lawmaker and third House Republican from Texas to announce his retirement in the past two weeks.

Mike Conaway, another GOP lawmaker from Texas, announced Wednesday that he would not seek reelection. Pete Olsonalso announced his retirement last month.

Hurd said in a statement that his purpose for leaving the CIA in 2014 to run for Congress was to “help give the lower chamber leadership in areas related to intelligence and national security.”

“While Congress has a role in these issues, so does the private sector and civil society,” he said. “After reflecting on how best to help our country address these challenges, I’m leaving the House of Representatives to help our country in a different way,” the Hill reports.

Hurd wasn’t just the only black Republican in the House; he was also the Texas congressman whose congressional district stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border between San Antonio and El Paso, and was at the center of the president’s push for an expensive and most likely ineffective migrant-blocking wall.

Hurd called the border crisis a “myth” and the wall a “third-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem” in an interview with Rolling Stone.

You know the beef that Trump created with “the Squad”—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich)—when he told them to “go back” to the “crime infested places” they came from?

Well, the Hill notes that Hurd was “one of the four House Republicans last month to vote to condemn Trump’s attacks against a group of minority congresswomen as racist.”

But don’t miss Hurd too much; he told the Washington Post that if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2020, he’s voting for him again. Dems are already salivating over Hurd’s soon-to-be-vacant seat.

“Hurd has been a lockstep supporter of the worst of Washington Republicans’ policies and he sealed his fate when he pledged to vote for Donald Trump in 2020,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Avery Jaffe told the Hill. “Democrats will win this seat and if Will Hurd doesn’t believe he can keep his job in a changing Texas, his colleagues must be having second thoughts too.”

Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Manny Garcia told the Hill in a statement that Hurd’s retirement is because he knew “his time was up.”

“The simple facts are that hypocrite Trump Republican Will Hurd did not stand a chance in the 23rd congressional district,” Garcia said. “Texas Democrats are rising up everywhere, clearly Will Hurd knew his time was up.”