Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served for three decades as Washington, D.C.’s nonvoting representative in Congress, on Tuesday announced she planned to retire at the end of her term, pivoting after months of insisting she had no intention of stepping aside.
“Thank you to my constituents for choosing and trusting me to fight for you in Congress 18 times,” she said in a statement. “I will leave this institution knowing that I have given you everything I have.”
The 88-year-old Democrat is the oldest person serving in the House. Once a forceful voice for the nation’s capital, she had retreated from her congressional duties in recent years amid signs of mental and physical decline.
But she had repeatedly swatted away the suggestion that she might leave Congress, including as recently as this month.
On Sunday, even after her campaign filed a termination notice for her re-election, her office declined to confirm that Ms. Norton planned to retire and she issued no statement, raising questions about whether she had approved the move — or even knew about it.
Ms. Norton, a civil-rights leader and former law professor who entered Congress in 1991, earned the moniker of D.C.’s “warrior on the Hill,” after decades of fighting for statehood for the district.
But in recent years her voice has diminished on Capitol Hill. She has said little since President Trump’s return to office, even as Republicans wielded their trifecta of power to increase federal control over the city she represents.
“The privilege of public service is inseparable from the responsibility to recognize when it’s time to lift up the next generation of leaders,” Ms. Norton said in her statement on Tuesday. “For D.C., that time has come.”
Her exit will mark the end of a strained final chapter of her congressional career in which Ms. Norton often appeared confused on Capitol Hill, but steadfastly refused to consider ending her long political career. She had become a symbol of the gerontocracy gripping Washington, sitting silent in committee meetings and saying little to push back on Republicans’ legislative attacks on the district and the deployment of the National Guard to police the city’s streets.
A former top staff member, Trent Holbrook, and several members of the D.C. City Council had already announced plans to run for her seat even before Ms. Norton announced she was stepping down.
On Tuesday, Democrats praised her for decades of work fighting for the rights of D.C. voters.
“Eleanor fought with deep patriotism for the people of the District of Columbia, honoring the history and promise of Washington while never wavering in her demand for justice,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in a statement.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington said in a statement on Sunday that Ms. Norton’s work “embodies the unwavering resolve of a city that refuses to yield in its fight for equal representation.”
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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