WASHINGTON — After 36 years in Congress, Republican U.S. Rep. Fred Upton has emptied his three offices, turned in the keys and shipped 102 boxes of his papers to the University of Michigan's library.
He cast the last of nearly 22,000 votes in the House of Representatives on Friday afternoon, voting "yay" on a $1.7 trillion package to fund the federal government for the next year before a short-term stopgap was set to expire later in the day.
But with his retirement looming, Upton gave no indication that he had slowed down on a recent weekday on Capitol Hill, reporting that he’d attended a bipartisan caucus meeting, an Aspen Institute policy breakfast, talked with a couple of Senate colleagues and returned a flurry of media calls all before noon.
"There's still so much to do. ... I'm working to the wire. I'm engaged in all these different issues," Upton said in an exit interview with The Detroit News this month.
"This is all networking, it's relationships, and the only way you get things done, of course, is working with both sides of the aisle. You have to have that relationship — the trust with others. And these are issues I care about. I care about not having the government shut down."
He then marveled aloud that he’d been the only Michigan Republican lawmaker to vote to avert an impending freight rail strike that could have had a $2 billion-a-day effect on the U.S. economy in the weeks before Christmas.
"Some of my colleagues said, 'We can just get the National Guard to drive these trains.' Really?" Upton recalled. "You want to put a 20-year-old National Guardsman in driving a locomotive or Amtrak? I don't think so. Some were saying, 'Let's just put this in Biden's lap. Blame him.' No."
In the spring, Upton opted not to run for a 19th term in the House, rather than face a potentially tough primary fight against fellow Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga after the redistricting commission drew them into the same district.
Upton is the delegation’s most senior member, representing southwest Michigan in Congress since 1987. Colleagues said they'll miss his measured tone, personal decency and commitment to civility in a GOP conference of increasingly brash and performative personalities. His brand of moderate conservatism, pragmatism and bipartisanship represents a fading corner in a Republican Party that's embraced partisan combativeness, populism and brinksmanship.
“The party essentially has left many of the people who are constructive and positive, as opposed to confrontational and destructive,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat. “That was not Fred Upton. That's not what he wanted to be. He's a man of great principle. He voted what he felt was practical and a help to the American people and to his constituents.”
Upton served under seven presidents and seven speakers and likes to say he wasn’t a “rubber stamp” for any of them. His record shows a history of working with folks across the political spectrum to build coalitions and pass legislation. His mild temperament and self-deprecating of humor put others at ease, while he insisted on no formal titles: “Just call me Fred.”
“Fred was decent, honest, his word was good, and he never bulls-----d you,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., who counts Upton as a close friend. “He listened to everybody, tried to hear all sides before he reached a conclusion. … He doesn’t believe in being negative.”
Upton will be remembered in history as one of 10 House Republicans who bucked his party in voting to impeach former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted insurrection.
That public break with the GOP two years ago opened a difficult new chapter for the congressman, leading to death threats, party censures and primary challenges from Trump loyalists.
"It kind of became like us against the world to some extent, at least within our party," said Rep. John Katko, a New York Republican and committee chairman who also backed impeachment.
Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, four are retiring, including Upton and Katko. Four others lost reelection, including Michigan's Peter Meijer, and just two will be returning to Congress next term.
"Losing someone of Fred's caliber means we're losing a giant of pragmatism, intelligence, likability, and bipartisanship," Katko said. "And that to me is a very bad loss for the Congress, for sure."
But Upton's onetime GOP challenger, state Rep. Steve Carra, cheered Upton’s decision to retire when it was announced back in April, calling it “a victory for southwest Michigan." Carra had called Upton an "anti-Trump RINO" (Republican In Name Only).
"He doesn't represent the conservative principles of southwest Michigan, and southwest Michigan deserves better," Carra said.
Upton said he won’t run for office again. He also won’t be abandoning the GOP and plans to stay involved in policy as an adviser to groups like the nonprofit No Labels group and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, of which he is vice chair. But he’s worried about the polarization and dysfunction of Congress and about his party’s future if it hews to Trump as its figurehead and 2024 presidential nominee.
“The sun is going to come up. Somehow we're gonna survive this,” he said, “but I'll tell you that the boulders are big in the river. They really are.”
Upton, 69, grew up in St. Joseph, the grandson of one of the founders of Whirlpool Corp. He still lives there, across the street from his parents. He majored in journalism at the University of Michigan and went into politics, working for U.S. Rep. David Stockman of Michigan and then the Reagan administration, for which he managed congressional affairs for the White House Office of Budget and Management.
In his first run for Congress in 1986, Upton defeated three-term incumbent Mark Siljander in the GOP primary, where Upton has said he was outspent 3-to-1.
“When I asked the Ottawa County GOP chairman if I should go work for Fred’s campaign he said, ‘Nice guy, but he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell,’” said Joan Hillebrands, who took the job anyway and still works for Upton 37 years later, the last 20 as his chief of staff.
He emphasized constituent services, with his team handling more than 1 million inquiries during his tenure, they said, from phone calls and walk-ins, to emails and printed letters that Upton signed himself as simply, "Fred."
“Sometimes we’d have, like, 200 letters about an issue and he’d read them all. He wanted to know where they were from,” said Janet Zielke, Upton's case worker since his first term.
In the House, Upton became fast friends with U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., whom he worked with on issues like clean air and, years later, the auto rescue. Upton joined the Committee on Energy and Commerce, from which he helped lead the 2000 probe into highway deaths linked to Firestone tires and Ford Motor Co.’s Explorer SUV.
Upton famously rolled a Firestone tire into the committee room and propped it up on the dais to make a point during a high-profile 2001 hearing — the tire had been taken off a neighbor’s SUV that his young daughter had ridden in on her way to a Girl Scout camping trip a few weeks before.
“These tires might have taken the life of my daughter,” Upton told Firestone and Ford executives during the hearing.
In response to the massive recall, Upton as chair of the oversight subcommittee was a lead author of the 2000 Transportation Recall Enhancement Accountability and Documentation Act, or TREAD Act, that boosted data sharing requirements for automakers and parts manufacturers in an effort to prevent defective auto parts from being ignored or covered up.
The legislation, which faced stiff opposition from the auto industry, also introduced criminal penalties for misleading federal officials about safety defects that caused death or injury, and mandated light motor vehicles have a tire-pressure monitoring system to alert drivers when a tire is under-inflated.
Upton later chaired the powerful Energy and Commerce panel for six years before handing off the gavel because of party term limits. During that time, 2010-16, the panel clashed with the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act, Keystone Pipeline permitting and its loan guarantee for the failed solar start-up Solyndra, but also got more than 200 bills signed into law during divided government, Upton said.
That includes his 21st Century Cures bill with Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado to speed medical innovation and treatments. It was the last bill signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2016, and Upton considers it his legacy.
“Four years later, COVID hits us, and it allowed Pfizer and Moderna to actually get their vaccine approved and be able to produce the vaccine maybe eight or 10 months earlier than they otherwise would have been able to,” Upton said. “That saved hundreds of thousands of Americans, let alone millions of people around the world.”
It wasn’t Upton’s only legislation on biomedical research, as he and Sen. John McCain of Arizona served as the GOP leads on a 1994 legislative bid to double funding for the National Institutes for Health. Upton enlisted a celebrity constituent, Parkinson’s patient Muhammad Ali — who at the time lived in Berrien Springs — to help make the case for the research funding.
In recent weeks, he lobbied the White House for funding and authorization for the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health in the omnibus spending bill that was passed Friday. It included $1.5 billion for what’s been dubbed ARPA-H.
The agency is envisioned as an incubator tasked with building platforms to support a high-risk approach to disease research and discovery, modeled after the success of the Pentagon's U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Upton lamented that he ran out of time to complete more of his planned updates to the Cures Act dubbed Cures 2.0, but he’s optimistic the work will continue next year without him.
“We've found a successor for me on the Republican side who will work with DeGette in the next Congress to continue the work. I can't tell you because it's not public yet.”
Upton in 1994 co-founded the Tuesday Group of moderate Republicans, initially to discuss policy priorities and politics over Tuesday lunch. It's grown to 45 members, and in 2020 rebranded itself the Republican Governance Group in support of "the governing wing of the House Republican Conference."
Upton worked across the aisle on issues such as protecting the Great Lakes, PFAS contamination, immigration reform and a tax credit for small businesses that had to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. He partnered with Republican and Democratic governors, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom he collaborated with on projects to replace lead service lines in Benton Harbor and long-delayed upgrades to U.S. 31, linking it to I-94.
Whitmer in a statement said Upton “set an example for every public servant with his integrity, empathy, honesty, and willingness to work across the aisle to get things done.”
Upton this year supported a bipartisan overhaul of how Congress counts electoral votes. This was a response to Trump’s plan to delay or disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Ensuring that a (Rep.) Mo Brooks and a (Sen.) Ted Cruz can't get together as one in the House and Senate to disregard a state's certified electoral vote count is important,” he said.
Upton’s name surfaced in recent weeks as a possible “consensus” or “unity” candidate for House speaker in the case that the GOP conference’s nominee, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, can’t muster the 218 votes needed to be elected to the post.
In that scenario, the idea is that more moderate House Republicans could potentially work with Democrats to elect a centrist like Upton as speaker when the new Congress convenes Jan. 3. The speaker does not have to be a current House member.
That unlikely scenario would almost certainly infuriate Trump, who gleefully celebrated the news of the pro-impeachment lawmaker’s retirement. For his part, Upton this week reiterated his support for McCarthy and the fact that he plans to be skiing in Utah when the speaker vote occurs Jan. 3 — thousands of miles from Capitol Hill.
“This was not at my initiation or prompting. I have tried to ignore the suggestions. I’m for Kevin,” Upton said.
Asked whether he’d accept the speakership if elected, Upton said, “I’m not answering that question.”
“I think it’s most unlikely,” he said. “I’m working on a different career, so we’ll watch with some interest. But I think it’s terribly unlikely that something will happen, but who knows how this is going to play out?”
That Upton’s name was even raised in such discussions is a credit to his approach to the job and his reputation as a "unifying" figure, said U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who works with Upton in leading the Problem Solvers Caucus.
“You'll never hear Fred get up on the floor of the House taking a broad swipe at an entire political party. You never hear him demeaning colleagues,” Fitzpatrick said. “He builds bridges. He doesn't drive wedges.”
As an example, he pointed to Upton’s "central" role in getting last year’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package enacted by working with the White House, Senate and other stakeholders.
“As Republicans, we took a beating for supporting that because we weren't just additional votes, we were outcome-determinative votes,” Fitzpatrick said. “We took a lot of backlash politically, but we firmly knew and still know that it was good for our country to do that.”
That infrastructure vote elicited well more than 1,000 calls including multiple "nasty" death threats to Upton and his family. The calls started after his GOP colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, publicly posted the names and phone numbers of Upton and a dozen other GOP House members who voted in support of the bill, calling them "traitors."
Upton had already witnessed a jump in threats since his vote to impeach Trump, but he said the surge was substantial. He worried about his staffers who were taking the calls and lost one employee over the spike in threats.
“This is not what our kids and families ought to be seeing," Upton said at the time. "It’s just a polarized, toxic environment. Worse than I’ve ever seen before."
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