By Mark Tapscott

If, as seems all but certain, Dr. Edelmira Patricia Garcia is elected next November to succeed her present boss, Rep. Jesus Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), as a member of the 120th Congress, she will represent a growing trend within the culture of career politicians that dominates American national public service.

The present 119th Congress includes 71 Members of the House of Representatives, who worked as congressional aides prior to being elected to the lower chamber. There are 20 members of the current Senate who similarly served as Hill aides before voters sent them to the world’s most exclusive debate club.

That Rep. Garcia will be succeeded by Rep. Garcia-elect — the two share the same last name but are unrelated — is a result of the congressman’s decision to delay announcing his foregoing a fifth two-year term until after his chief of staff, who goes by “Patty” Garcia, became the only Democrat who filed to run for Illinois’s Fourth Congressional District seat in 2026. The safe blue district is on Chicago’s West Side.

Garcia said he is retiring from the House for health reasons, his own and that of his wife. He denied doing anything improper, telling The Washington Post that he “followed the rules of Illinois and its election law.” Garcia is not the first Illinois Democratic representative to use such tactics to ensure a certain successor. In fact, he benefited from a similar move by the retiring Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who backed Garcia and withheld his own retirement decision. That enabled Garcia to move into the seat without facing a competitive primary.

Rep. Garcia’s similarly unexpected decision became the occasion Tuesday for his reputation to suffer a serious blackmark as the House — in a bipartisan vote that saw 23 of his fellow Democrats joining 213 Republicans — pass a resolution rebuking him for “undermining the process of a free and fair election.”

The resolution, which does not impose concrete penalties of any kind, was introduced by another Democrat, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state. Perez, who was booed by a number of her Democratic colleagues during the debate, explained on the House floor that she sponsored the resolution because “it’s clear to me that my responsibility as an elected representative of my community is to say loudly and consistently, humbly and with love, that no one has the right to subvert the right of the people to choose their elected representatives.”

The two Garcias share multiple traits common among career politician-members of both the Republican and Democratic congressional parties, including spending their entire careers on the public payroll or on those of advocacy groups seeking to affect public policy.

Rep. Garcia first entered public office in 1986 after several years as a community organizer, serving successively as a member of the Chicago City Council, the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and the Illinois State Senate before winning his first term in the House in 2018. He was re-elected comfortably in 2020, 2022, and 2024. He was strongly favored to win again in 2026.

After earning her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies in 2011 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, Patty Garcia worked from 2012 to 2014 as Data and Campaigns Manager for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund, followed by three years as deputy director for Constituency Services-Education for the same nonprofit. She joined Rep. Garcia’s congressional staff as district director in January 2019, then was promoted through the Washington staff ranks to become chief of staff in September 2023.

The career politician model of today stands in sharp contrast to the citizen servant model of America’s founding era, during which the typical representative served a couple of terms, then returned to private life. There were exceptions such as Henry Clay of Kentucky, who served 16 years in the Senate and 12 terms in the House between the years 1806 and 1852.

The average years of congressional experience in the earliest decades under the Constitution in the 19th century were 2.5 years, according to congress.gov. Between the convening of the first Congress in 1789 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, it was not uncommon for many, if not most, members of the House to be freshmen.

According to congress.gov:

“During much of the 19th century, the average tenure of Representatives and Senators remained relatively steady, with incoming Representatives generally averaging between two and three years of prior service in most Congresses, and the Senators averaging between three and five years. Beginning in the late 19th and through much of the 20th century, average tenure for Members in both chambers steadily increased. Senators’ average years of prior service [have] increased from just under 5 years during the early 1880s to approximately 11 years in the most recent Congress. Similarly, the average tenure of Representatives has increased from approximately three years during the early 1880s to approximately nine years in the most recent Congress.”

Parallel to the increased length of careers in elective office, the re-election rate in the Senate and House has made challenging an incumbent a nearly insurmountable challenge.

“Few things in life are more predictable than the chances of an incumbent member of the U.S. House of Representatives winning reelection. With wide name recognition and usually an insurmountable advantage in campaign cash, House incumbents typically have little trouble holding onto their seats — as this chart shows,” said Open Secrets in a 2024 analysis.

“Senate races still overwhelmingly favor the incumbent, but not by as reliable a margin as House races. Big swings in the national mood can sometimes topple long-time office-holders, as happened with the Reagan revolution in 1980. Even so, years like that are an exception,” the Open Secret analysis continued.

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.