Republican Congressman Tom Marino suddenly announced his retirement from the House of Representatives on Thursday, effective in just 6 days.
Speaking to the Daily Item, a PA newspaper from his district, Marino used the platform to make his official statement:
Having spent over two decades serving the public, I have chosen to take a position in the private sector where I can use both my legal and business experience to create jobs around the nation. IÂ want to thank the people of the 12th Congressional District of Pennsylvania for the faith they have placed in me to represent them in Congress. It truly has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”
Marino won reelection in November in a heavily Republican district of Pennsylvania, and it’s not clear how donors who helped propel him to that victory feel about his sudden departure. He was elected for the first time in 2010 during the Tea Party wave midterm election, which would have made this his fifth term in Congress if he had completed it. Less than one month has passed since this Congress was seated — it will have been only 20 days, in fact, by the day Marino leaves.
That’s not the shortest term ever served in Congressional history, but it’s close: Democrat Effingham Lawrence served a single day in Congress back in 1875.
Marino was the co-chair for Donald Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania, a swing state that Trump unexpectedly won in 2016 after winning over a not-insignificant number of disaffected Democrats who couldn’t possibly have seen what was in store for the following presidential term.
Marino’s district was one redrawn by the courts after Republicans were found to have illegally gerrymandered the district maps in Pennsylvania to favor Republicans. GOP legislators had obviously drawn the district maps to include all Democratic votes into just a few districts, leaving the rest of the rural, more sparsely populated areas to be governed by Republicans — in far greater numbers.
Featured image via screen capture
