Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer calls it quits after 50 years in politics

As he prepares to step down from Congress after a political career that spanned five decades, Democratic U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer is ever more certain he made the right choice.

The 76-year-old Portlander, known in his home state and in Washington, D.C., for his uniform of a bow tie and brightly colored bike pin and focus on livability issues, has never been a particularly flashy or famous politician.

He acknowledged that in his final floor speech earlier this month, highlighting the new bike lanes and a visa program he worked on as he urged new members of Congress to find ways to work together.

“My goal as a member of Congress was to leave this place a little better than I found it, and I’m proud of what we have done,” he said. “They’re things that you’re not going to see on Fox or MSNBC news. It’s not going to rocket around the internet. But they’re simple, common-sense efforts to bring people together to solve problems.”

Blumenauer has been the dean and oldest member of Oregon’s congressional delegation since former Rep. Peter DeFazio retired in 2023. He told the Capital Chronicle he “just sort of fell into politics”: When he was a junior studying political science at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, he had the chance to lead Oregon’s effort to lower the voting age to 19.

That campaign didn’t succeed, but a year later states ratified the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age nationwide to 18. And it gave Blumenauer the opportunity to meet people all over Oregon and testify before a U.S. Senate committee for the first time.

“I had a lot of fun,” he said. “I felt like we were doing something that was important, and it just kind of led from there to service in the Legislature, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It wasn’t a plan.”

He won his first election, to represent Portland in the Legislature, at age 24 in 1972. He stayed in the Legislature until 1979, spent 1979-86 on the Multnomah County Commission and served on the Portland City Council from 1987 to 1996, when he ran for Congress.

During his decades in politics, Blumenauer only lost two elections: a 1981 run for the Portland City Council and a 1992 campaign for mayor of Portland.

Different outlook last year

When he announced his decision to step down last year, Blumenauer said he was certain Democrats would regain control of the House and that knowing he could serve as chairman of a subcommittee of the budget-writing Ways & Means Committee made it harder to leave.

But Democrats didn’t win — Republicans will start 2025 with a five-seat majority in the U.S. House, a three-seat majority in the Senate and former President Donald Trump back in the White House.

“They forgot to get reelected,” Blumenauer quipped when asked what changed between 2023 and 2024. He added that “collective amnesia” about Trump’s first term helped Republicans win.

“People don’t remember how bad he left the country when he was no longer president,” Blumenauer said. “They forget how high the unemployment rate was, the inflation rate, the problems that we had. More people died with the pandemic because of inept action. People have forgotten all about that.”

He stands by his July decision to call on President Joe Biden to step aside, though he also said Biden was the most effective president during Blumenauer’s years in Washington, D.C. Biden simply didn’t have the time or energy to do everything he needed to do as president and campaign, Blumenauer said.

“I think it’s important in politics to know when it’s time to move on,” Blumenauer said. “I felt that last October, that I’d done what I could do, and that I could actually be more productive leaving Congress, and I feel very good about that decision. I think it was important for President Biden to step aside because there’s so much that needs to be done.”

With the exception of Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Democratic Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, who will replace Blumenauer as dean of Oregon’s congressional delegation, none of Oregon’s congressional representatives have experience with a Trump presidency. Rep. Cliff Bentz, the only remaining Republican in the delegation, was elected in 2020; Democrats Val Hoyle and Andrea Salinas in 2022 and Democrats Janelle Bynum and Maxine Dexter — the former state representative who will replace Blumenauer — in November.

Focus on bipartisanship

Blumenauer said he’s advising his Oregon colleagues and others to focus on issues where they can find bipartisan support.

“I’ve had success with Republican administrations and Republicans in Congress when we were in the minority by focusing on things that matter,” he said. “What we’ve done in terms of transportation, health care, working on our initiatives with animal welfare, rebuilding and renewing America, these are things that are not intensely partisan. They bring people together rather than divide them.”

But he also doesn’t regret leaving Congress, which he said has become increasingly partisan and dysfunctional. In his telling, things started changing for the worse shortly before he arrived in D.C., with Republican Newt Gingrich’s 1995 ascension to House speaker. Gingrich cut the congressional workweek from five days to three, sending lawmakers home to fundraise and campaign in their districts instead of fraternizing with colleagues, and he encouraged Republicans to stop being “nice.”

Social media made that trend worse, Blumenauer said, leading to representatives like Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz focusing solely on getting attention. The more outrageous their behavior, the more they’re rewarded with campaign contributions and political support in lopsided districts, he said.

“That is a fundamental difference in terms of how much social media and weaponizing the process has come to dominate,” he said. “A number of these people have nobody on their staff that works on policy. It’s all about public relations and politics, and I think that’s sad.”

Blumenauer has spent his last few weeks in office wrapping up projects, writing exit memos and finding other members of Congress to continue advocating for his issues. He’s pushing to accelerate dispersing federal funds for infrastructure, including Portland’s 82nd Avenue transit project, and finding lawmakers to champion funding for public broadcasting and efforts to make banking available for marijuana-related businesses.

He said he’s looking forward to no longer spending 14 hours each week on airplanes or in airports and to shifting his focus to a new faculty job at Portland State University’s Institute for Metropolitan Studies.

“We’ve taken our projects and handed them off to other people, and every time I turn around, there’s another group that’s giving me a lifetime achievement award,” Blumenauer said. “Having made the decision last October that it just wasn’t worth it to spend two more years of my life to try and be elected to a dysfunctional Congress — and it just got weirder — I couldn’t feel better about the decision.”

Julia Shumway is the Capital Chronicle’s deputy editor and lead political reporter.