Eric Swalwell resigns from Congress

Representative Eric Swalwell said he will resign from Congress after the House ethics committee opened an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, a decision that also ends his bid for governor of California. According to The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a former staffer accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting her twice, while CNN published additional claims from three women alleging unwanted explicit messages or photos.

Swalwell framed his resignation as a response to two pressures that rarely coexist comfortably in Washington: the demand for immediate accountability and the institution’s slow, lawyered procedures. In his statement, he said he would “fight the serious false allegation” while taking responsibility for “mistakes in judgment” and argued that “expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong.” At the same time, he said his constituents should not have a distracted representative and that the threat of an expulsion vote had become real.

The episode lands in a Congress where discipline is largely political theatre until it suddenly is not. The ethics committee is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, which often produces delay; yet Swalwell faced a “growing chorus of bipartisan calls” to leave, and multiple lawmakers are now being publicly grouped together as targets for removal. The Guardian notes that calls for resignation or expulsion have also been directed at Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican who acknowledged an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide; Cory Mills, a Florida Republican facing allegations of ethical lapses; and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat indicted on federal charges tied to disaster relief funds.

In practice, the enforcement mechanism is not the committee’s investigative capacity but the threat that colleagues will decide the reputational cost of waiting is higher than the procedural cost of acting. That calculation is volatile in a House where party leaders can benefit from weaponising ethics against opponents, but also risk setting precedents that rebound. Swalwell’s resignation short-circuits that cycle: it removes the need for a floor fight while leaving the underlying question—what Congress considers “due process” for misconduct allegations—unresolved.

Swalwell’s seat will now be vacated while the ethics committee investigation continues in the background. A politician who was, according to polling cited by The Guardian, narrowly leading California’s governor race last week is leaving office before any formal finding is issued.