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Rep. Steny H. Hoyer announced Thursday he will not run for reelection and will end a nearly six-decade career in elected office that spanned his rising-star days in Maryland government to a two-decade run as the No. 2 U.S. House Democrat.

Hoyer, the third-longest-serving member of the House, said he reached the decision over the holidays with his family, feeling content with a career that never brought the brass ring of the House speaker’s gavel but put him at the center of this century’s biggest debates.

“At this young age, it’s probably premature,” the 86-year-old quipped in a two-hour interview Tuesday at his sprawling home on the Patuxent River in St. Mary’s County.

Now three years out of leadership, Hoyer remains an active legislator but feared ending up like many other elderly lawmakers, becoming physically or mentally frail in their final days in office.

“I did not want to be one of those members who clearly stayed, outstayed his or her ability to do the job,” said Hoyer.

He delivered a formal announcement in a House floor speech Thursday morning, with dozens of colleagues from both sides of the aisle on hand to cheer.

In his remarks, Hoyer made clear he was not like the more than 40 other House members who, largely fed up with Congress, are running for other offices or retiring. Hoyer said he still loves the institution, while recognizing that his style of extending a courteous hand to the political opposition is outdated.

Hoyer spent decades on the Appropriations Committee, helping to pour billions of dollars into a congressional district that begins just a few miles east of the Capitol. But Hoyer’s final years on the panel have seen it snarled in partisan gridlock.

In the Tuesday interview, Hoyer said his constituents, more reliant on the federal government than most, ask when Congress will work in a more functional way, a question that Hoyer puts back on those voters.

“As long as the people of America elect angry, confrontational people, don’t be surprised that democracy works and you get an angry, confrontational Congress,” Hoyer said.

Hoyer said American politics are in a state of decades-long deterioration. But he blamed President Donald Trump for making bipartisan comity harder than ever, pointing out the pardons of those convicted for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack during his interview with The Washington Post, which took place on the fifth anniversary of the insurrection.

“His greatest strength, he has no shame, does not,” Hoyer said of Trump. “And his people don’t care whatever he does, pardoning 1,600 people who committed treason. Just astounding, and then he gets away with it.”

Hoyer will go down in history behind only Leslie C. Arends (R., Ill.) for length of leadership service in the No. 2 post for a House caucus without ever getting promoted to the top spot. From the early 1940s until 1974, Arends totaled almost 30 years as the GOP’s first deputy.

Hoyer’s list of legislative accomplishments is long — including authoring the Americans With Disabilities Act and the election law responding to the disputed 2000 presidential race — but his biggest contribution may have been serving as a cooling agent when partisan temperatures ran hot in the raucous House.

Many Republicans viewed him as an honest broker and a lighter touch than Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who led the caucus for the 20 years Hoyer served as her deputy.

In his Thursday speech, Hoyer lamented the decay of bipartisan relationships and a House that produces less legislation than in years past.

“I am deeply concerned that this House is not living up to the Founders’ goals,” Hoyer told his colleagues. “I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to examine their conscience, renew their courage.”

Hoyer lost a 2001 race for minority whip to Pelosi, a contest that highlighted the party’s pivot away from the South and Midwest and toward the more professional class of voters along the coasts. When Pelosi took charge in January 2003, the caucus unanimously elected Hoyer as her top lieutenant.

Hoyer said he understands why “tough-as-nails” Pelosi remained leader so long, calling her the best of 10 speakers he served under in nearly 45 years in the House.

“Sure, I would have loved to have been speaker. Who wouldn’t love to be speaker? But they’re not deep regrets,” he said in the interview.

Hoyer and Pelosi, along with Rep. James E. Clyburn (D., S.C.), are together linked for their historically long runs as the top three lawmakers running the caucus. They notched victories such as the 2008 financial rescue, the 2010 Affordable Care Act and several trillion dollars worth of pandemic relief this decade.

When Republicans won the House majority in the 2022 midterms, all three decided to step down and let a younger generation take the reins of the caucus. Pelosi announced in November that she will not run for reelection, while Clyburn has so far signaled he will run again.

“Ironically, Nancy, Jim and I have not talked about any one of our actions or any one of our retirements. So I haven’t talked to Nancy. I haven’t talked to Jim,” Hoyer said.

Pelosi, 85, and Hoyer are retiring as their party is still in a heated debate over whether its elder statesmen have stayed too long in Washington, particularly after President Joe Biden’s late exit from the 2024 presidential campaign.

Hoyer’s wife, Elaine C. Kamarck, a Brookings Institution political scholar, dubbed the trio of Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn as “super-agers” for their ability to effectively run the Democratic caucus while in their 80s, but Hoyer is conscious of passing the baton to the next generation.

Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn carved out different responsibilities and represented a new, diverse 21st-century caucus: a liberal woman from California’s tech center; a White man with close ties to the shrinking ranks of Democrats from the South and Midwest; and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress.

Hoyer said he considers passage of the Affordable Care Act a prototype for when their leadership style worked. Pelosi — who has “a spine of steel,” he said — led the effort and had the bona fides to tell liberals what the best deal possible was. Hoyer served as sounding board for dozens of Democrats in competitive districts worried about their 2010 elections.

“A number of people would say I played an important part in bringing along people who had concerns about it from their district’s standpoint,” he said.

Democrats lost a stunning 63 seats in those midterms and spent eight subsequent years in the minority, leading some to question whether new, younger leadership was needed.

Pelosi and Hoyer have had a sometimes strained relationship — dating at least to the late 1990s when they began a several-year campaign against one another for a leadership post — but the caucus seemingly wanted that balance.

“We were put together by the caucus,” Hoyer said. “And what I mean by that, Nancy was elected, I was elected and Clyburn was elected. We weren’t elected as a team.”

The current House Democratic leadership team — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Minority Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.) and Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.) — effectively ran together three years ago trying to replicate the ideological and diverse balance of the old team.

Hoyer had not yet drawn a top primary challenge in his congressional district, but his exit will undoubtedly prompt many younger Maryland politicians to consider running in a race where Hoyer said he will not make an early endorsement.

His early endorsement of Wes Moore, helped elevate the then-long-shot candidate to victory in the 2022 Maryland governor’s race. Now running for reelection at 47, Moore is mentioned as a future presidential candidate — a campaign Hoyer said he hopes to play a role in.

“His true genius resides not simply in the grand American story he has helped to write, but in the many quiet moments of service and support he has given,” Moore said in a statement.

A vast majority of House members have no idea Hoyer’s first image in politics was as a young man in a hurry. Just 27 when he took office in the Maryland state Senate in 1967, Hoyer became the chamber’s president at 35 and plotted a run for governor in 1978, with his ultimate ambition being the U.S. Senate.

“I was a little ahead of myself,” he recalled Tuesday. He eventually accepted a spot as lieutenant governor candidate on a ticket that lost the party nomination badly.

His start in politics was launched when, as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, he attended a campus rally for Sen. John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960.

Following a file clerk job at the Central Intelligence Agency, Hoyer began working for Rep. Daniel Brewster (D., Md.), would move with him to the Senate in 1963 and meet a young Pelosi as a co-worker.

In 1981, after the local congresswoman suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma, Hoyer narrowly won a crowded primary and was on his way up the ladder in the U.S. House.

The family of his first wife bought land in St. Mary’s County on the Patuxent in 1989, and the Hoyers built their getaway home well outside his district.

The 1992 redistricting brought this rural territory into Hoyer’s 5th Congressional District, and the couple turned it into a permanent home. An educator in Prince George’s County schools, Judith Hoyer died in 1997 and the congressman passed legislation creating “Judy Centers” for early-childhood programs.

The home, dubbed “Hoyer’s Point of View,” hosted his wedding to Kamarck in 2023. A proud Dane who’s looked out for Nordic interests on the Helsinki Commission, Hoyer flies the flag of Denmark alongside those of Maryland and the U.S.

Hoyer said he’s not sure how he will handle life outside elective politics, but he has a ready answer when people ask him about Congress.

“How do we make this better?” he said. “You do. You’re a voter. You send the right people there, it’ll get better.”