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The growing abyss between our two major political parties has bogged down the legislative process to a bare trickle, a situation that many fear will only get worse as the election season, and accompanying rhetoric, heat up.
Fortunately, some levelheaded lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle seem to be recognizing that many problems still need to be addressed and issues need to be resolved, and they area starting to actually work together. Even better, those sensible legislators include Rio Grande Valley representatives.
Last month Democratic U.S. Reps. Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen and Henry Cuellar of Laredo, along with Republican Monica De La Cruz of McAllen, added their names to a letter sent by U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz asking Secretary of State Antony Blinken to improve operations at our international bridges.
The letter asserts that the “bureaucratic hurdle” of requiring a “laborious environmental study” for every proposed border infrastructure project only slows them down, and new projects awaiting administration review should be approved without them. The argument makes sense; repeated reviews are redundant, as studies already have been conducted for previous projects at the same locations, and little if any new data would come from new reviews.
We hope the administration sees both the logic of the request and its bipartisan nature, and help make border improvements happen more quickly.
Gonzalez and Cuellar, along with Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, also have signed on to a bipartisan bill that could further speed up border projects by creating an oversight board to review requests and a separate budget line item specifically to fund them, thus streamlining the funding process.
Escobar also has joined with Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida to submit an immigration reform bill that promotes border security measures other than the simplistic border wall that already has proven ineffective. It also would bring about needed reforms that some hard-liners oppose but up to three-fourths of the American people support, such as providing a path to citizenship for people who were brought to this country as children and have lived here since, streamlining the asylum process and improve visa allocations.
At a recent news conference, Salazar and Escobar both pledged to plead their case to members of their respective parties in hopes that they can build the kind of bipartisan support that could bring the most comprehensive immigration reform since 1986.
This is the kind of cooperation that is supposed to define the political process, but has been rare for far too long. It’s the process our nation’s founders designed when building a recipe for republican governance, in which differing and sometimes competing interests and concerns are debated and melded into policies that could bring the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people.
It’s good to see that some lawmakers, including our own, are starting to recognize the need to place country over party instead of the opposite, which we have seen far too long.
We hope the idea catches on.
RELATED READING:
Valley lawmakers join Cruz, Cornyn to ask White House for border bridge support
