The congressmember tasked with making the GOP more diverse is quitting

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 14 June 2019

Republicans lost 40 House seats in the last midterm elections. Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) was supposed to make sure it never happened again.

But on Friday, the National Republican Congressional Committee's recruitment chair shocked Capitol Hill — and especially her own party — by announcing she wouldn't run for reelection. And when asked how she thought her party's leaders would deal with it, well, Brooks told the Indianapolis Star she has "no idea what they're going to do."

When Democrats swept the House last fall, they did it with the most diverse freshman class to date. Yet barely any of that diversity has extended to the GOP, where just 15 of its 198 members are women and all but nine are white. Brooks told her party that was a big problem at an April meeting, calling on Republican leaders to "do a better job of looking like America," Roll Call reported. At that point, Brooks said she'd recruited five women candidates to run in 2020, four of whom are people of color.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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