Washington —  Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is resigning from Congress at the end of the month, he announced Wednesday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ending weeks of speculation about his future after he was ousted from his leadership role in October.

“I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year to serve America in new ways,” McCarthy said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “I know my work is only getting started.”

McCarthy’s departure makes him the latest member to retire amid growing polarization that has made it difficult for Congress to operate. It comes a day after Rep. Patrick McHenry, former speaker pro tempore, announced his impending retirement from Congress.

The California Republican recently indicated that he’s been going through stages of grief since his ouster and did not want to make a rash decision about his future. 

“If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart I’m giving 110%. I have to know that I want to do that,” McCarthy said recently at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit. “I also have to know if I’m going to walk away, that I’m going to be fine with walking away.” 

“If you just got thrown out of speaker, you’d go through different stages, would you not?” he added. “I want to know that it’s the right thing to do. And then if I’m walking away from something that I spent two decades at, I don’t want to look back and say I made an emotional decision.”

McCarthy, who was elected to Congress in 2006, held the top post for nine months before a deal he made to secure the speakership led to his downfall. 

McCarthy’s fight to win the gavel — which included 15 rounds of votes — foreshadowed the limits of his power over a fractured Republican Party with a slim majority.

Among the concessions McCarthy made to win the support of far-right Republican holdouts, he agreed that a single member could trigger a no-confidence vote. That came back to haunt him when fellow Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida introduced a resolution to remove him from the leadership role after he relied heavily on the votes of House Democrats to temporarily avert a government shutdown in September. Eight Republicans voted with all Democrats to remove McCarthy, making it the first time in U.S. history a House speaker was ousted by such a motion. 

His successor, House Speaker Mike Johnson, has made similar decisions since taking over, including relying on Democrats to avert a shutdown in November, but has so far avoided McCarthy’s fate.

Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a McCarthy ally who served as the temporary speaker following the ouster, announced his own retirement on Tuesday. 

McCarthy has not hidden his disdain for the Republicans who voted for his removal, telling CNN last month that Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina did not deserve to be reelected, and the Republican Party would benefit “tremendously” if Gaetz was not in Congress. He also questioned the motives of Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee. 

“They care a lot about press, not about policy, and so they seem to just want the press and the personality,” McCarthy told CNN. 

Burchett later accused McCarthy of elbowing him in the back in a Capitol Hill hallway in retaliation for the vote, which McCarthy denied. 

“If I were to hit somebody, they would know I hit them,” McCarthy said.