What is Mitt Romney’s net worth? The Republican Senator from Utah announces his retirement
Utah Senator Mitt Romney has announced that he will not run for a second term. What did he do before becoming a senator?
Utah Senator Mitt Romney did what many in his chamber believe to be unthinkable on Wednesday: announced his retirement.
Sen. Mitt Romney, seventy-six years old, has served in the Senate since 2019. As reports circulate from Capitol Hill raising questions about the mental faculties of various senators on both sides of the aisle, the Utah leader has decided he will not seek a second term in office. The latter half of Sen. Romney’s career has been spent in public service. Before being elected to the Senate, he served as the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
Like many in Washington, Sen. Romney came to the public sector from the private. He was the co-founder and CEO of Bain & Company, a private equity investment that started in the 1980s that would grow to become one of the largest institutions of its kind. In 2018, before entering the Senate, Open Secrets estimated Romney’s net worth to be around $174 million.
Sen. Romney keeps busy, sitting on many high-profile committees, including Budget, Foreign Relations, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committees. When making his retirement announcement, he had some harsh words for the leaders of both major political parties.
Romney calls on a new generation of leaders
The average age of the US Senate is sixty-four years old. During the announcement video, Sen. Romney noted that it was time for the old guard of both parties to step aside and create room for a new generation of leaders.
“I have spent my last twenty-five years in public service of one kind or another. At the end of another term, I would be in my mid-eighties. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”
The health and ability of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have been called into question after private reports and public incidents have made the issue of their cognitive abilities hard to ignore. Sen. McConnell has been caught wholly paralyzed, unable to speak in front of the press on two separate occasions over the last few weeks, and yet, the eighty-one-year-old has made clear that he will continue at this post. Sen. Feinstein, who at ninety is the country’s oldest senator, has been the subject of scrutiny by members of her own party after reports of her cognitive decline became public. The California leader, who has served in the Senate since the early 1990s, has been caught fumbling through basic parliamentary protocol, relying on aids to give her directions at highly inopportune times. However, age is not always a disqualifier. Chuck Grassley (R-IO) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), at the ripe ages of eighty-nine and eighty-two, seem to keep up.
But their colleague, Sen. Romney, raises an important question: Even if you can serve at that age, should you?
The future is full of incredibly complex challenges that younger generations will have to confront. Following the Utah senator, those who will live to see that future should decide how it is governed. A representative body should represent the demos. Those over fifty make up slightly over a third of the US population, and their political needs and opinions should be fully represented, to the extent that such representation is possible, within the country’s institutions of governance. This age group makes up ninety-two percent of Senators.
Sixteen senators are Mitt Romney’s age or older, and only time will tell if they decide to make the same decision he has.