How much room is left in the Grand Old Party for those who don’t tow the MAGA line, 100% of the time?

On the day after the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s first Republican president, Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher’s surprise Feb. 10 announcement that he would retire from the House of Representatives when his term ends has set us wondering.

Gallagher is 39 years old and in just his fourth term in the House. He was viewed as a rising star in the Republican Party and in Wisconsin, where he represents Green Bay and areas around it. His voting record is solidly conservative.

But he was one of three House Republicans to vote against impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In an acute embarrassment for House Speaker Mike Johnson, the three no votes last week were just enough to keep the first impeachment bid from succeeding.

In his statement on the vote, Gallagher said Mayorkas had been “stunningly incompetent” in the role. But, he said, those backing Mayorkas’ impeachment failed to show he’d done anything rising to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the constitutional threshold for taking that step.

“Creating a new, lower standard of impeachment, one without any clear limiting principle, won’t secure the border or hold Mr. Biden accountable,” Gallagher wrote in a Feb. 6 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “It would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.”

Gallagher’s defection enraged some fellow Republicans in the House. The blame for the embarrassment lay more accurately with Speaker Johnson’s apparent inability to count votes in his chamber. A Democratic member who’d had abdominal surgery showed up in hospital garb to cast the deciding vote, surprising the GOP leadership, who had left themselves no margin for such surprises.

We’re old enough to remember when a member of Gallagher’s standing could explain such a vote by saying they were upholding their oaths to support the Constitution and move on. Those times apparently are behind us, much to the country’s misfortune. Gallagher said he made his decision not to run “with a heavy heart.”

A former Marine who served in Iraq, Gallagher is an expert on foreign affairs and an ardent backer of U.S. aid to Ukraine. In other words, Gallagher is the type of GOP House member who would have been regarded in another era as straight out of central casting.

The Wisconsinite isn’t the only House member to call it a day. More than 40 others, both Republicans and Democrats, are leaving the chamber at the end of this Congress. Some, as usual, are reaching for higher office. But many simply are done with what the House has become.

They include other well-regarded Republicans such as Washington state Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the first woman ever to chair the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. She’s only 54.

Removing a speaker, seeking to impeach cabinet members over performance and differences of policy, and threatening repeatedly to shut down the government must wear on those who really came to Washington to do the nation’s business and make a difference. The House simply is an embarrassment under MAGA control, as many Republicans acknowledge.

Departures of reasonable, principled members such as Gallagher and McMorris Rodgers won’t improve matters for Republicans in the House.

In Gallagher’s case, it appears he didn’t desire to go; he was forced by the realities of life as a Republican these days to do so, once he had bucked his leadership on what should really have been a matter of individual conscience.

For Gallagher and McMorris Rodgers, voting with their feet in this way is a stronger statement about their views on the near-term future of the GOP than any words they might offer. They will be missed.

— The Chicago Tribune