Facing one of the most divided congressional bodies in recent memory, with an incoming Democratic administration expected to be challenged often by Republican leadership, congressmen representing the Rio Grande Valley will have their work cut out for them as they advocate for their respective legislative agendas.
Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome of the Senate runoff elections in Georgia, and amid the looming specter of the Electoral College count facing Congress on Wednesday, it’s a near certainty that tumult will remain given the current state of political divisiveness.
But for U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, he’s considering the 117th Congress as an opportunity to steer the 15th district through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“My number one priority for my district is to get us vaccinated and inoculated, and to get us past this pandemic as fast as possible and be able to rebuild our local economy,” Gonzalez said Monday.
He hopes to get stores and international bridges back open, and hopes to get more children back to school with in-person instruction.
“I’m very optimistic that this is happening,” Gonzalez said. “We’re in the process of it happening. It’s going to happen sooner than people think. Our economy is going to open all the way again, and we’ll see unemployment numbers go down. We’ll see lines at the food banks shortened and traditional American prosperity come back. That’s my number one priority, and I think we’re on track for that.”
Gonzalez said he’s supporting any bill that will bring upward economic mobility to his constituents, including bills that will help grow small businesses and help students go to college debt-free. He also continues to be a supporter, to the chagrin of many in his party, of the oil and gas industry, which he said is a source for many jobs in his district.
One key piece of legislation he’s paying close attention to is his deported veteran bill, which he’s long championed. The congressman said that he believes the bill now has enough bipartisan support to get it to the floor for a vote and moved to the Senate.
“Now we have a Biden White House that I think will be very helpful in making this a reality and bringing home deported veterans,” Gonzalez said. “I still can’t believe that we continue to deport men and women who wore a uniform and served honorably and fought for our freedom. Then to come home, get in a little trouble, and find themselves deported.”
Gonzalez said he has no problem working with members of either party. He is part of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which includes 44 members split between the GOP and the Democrats. He said that they meet once a week to try to find common ground on issues that are important to Americans by reducing politics.
“I’ve been one of the most bipartisan members of Congress,” Gonzalez said. “I think I’m in the top 5% of bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress, and I’ve been that way since Day 1. When I came to the United States Congress, I always said that I wasn’t going to represent a party; I was going to represent the people. I try to take middle-of-the-road positions and have common sense ideas that help our region without the partisan political hyper-focus that we seem to be living with nowadays.”
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said that education and healthcare are two of his main priorities going into his ninth term of office, however getting through the pandemic and reopening the economy is taking precedence.
Cuellar has already made efforts to offset the economic impact of the pandemic with his support of the COVID relief bill.
Now the focus is on vaccinating.
“As you know, the federal government buys the vaccines. We got them developed, researched, and then sent them off to the states. But there have been issues with the distribution because I’ve gotten a lot of calls from my district about not having enough vaccines here or there,” he said.
Cuellar added that Congress must accelerate the rate of distribution by working with the state because lives and the economy hang in the balance.
To strengthen those efforts, he said that Congress must provide help in the form of the Paycheck Protection Program, money for unemployment and stimulus checks. Like Gonzalez, he is also looking at ways to safely open international bridges.
“On education, I have brought to land more money for Pell Grants, GEAR UP, all those programs to make sure that the students have money,” Cuellar said. “Money will be going to colleges, universities so they can have money like they had under the CARES Act so they can provide money to students. …They can use that money to pay their rent if they still have rent, books, tuition and all that. We did that again on the relief bill.”
Cuellar said that he was a supporter of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, when President-elect Joe Biden was vice president, and plans on continuing the fight to expand healthcare affordability.
“One of the things the state can do is to expand Medicaid,” Cuellar said. “They have millions of federal dollars because they refuse to expand Medicaid. I’m hoping that under this pandemic they will be a little more sensitive to expand health care with the billions of dollars that we’ve provided.”
Like his colleagues, U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, said he’ll apply laserbeam focus on mitigating the spread of the virus by pushing to get more needles in people’s arms.
“Chief among my priorities is crushing the coronavirus by ensuring access to adequate testing and more broadly distributing the vaccine to both urban and rural areas so we can rid ourselves of this devastating virus as soon as possible,” Vela said in a statement Tuesday.
But he also pointed to economic development demands in a region that — prior to the pandemic — was rebounding in monthly sales tax revenue.
Then there’s the need to better healthcare access, a need only exacerbated by COVID-19.
Addressing as much in his statement, Vela said he’ll fight to improve that access by strengthening partnerships with the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s School of Medicine, which was at the forefront of early virus testing efforts last year, and “community health centers to address the primary care needs of our rural and underserved communities.”
Other priorities he outlined are to “push for prescription drug reform; invest in local talent by supporting programs like Head Start to ensure the students in my district have access to quality education beginning in preschool and continuing through college and beyond; (and) increase funding for Hispanic Serving Institutions.”
Upgrading port facilities covering the land, air and sea is also paramount for the Brownsville-based congressman to “ensure people and goods can move safely and efficiently.”
In addition, premium health care for veterans is high up on Vela’s list, fighting for benefits such as disability compensation, as well as closing the Wi-Fi gap among his constituents — another problem exacerbated by the virus.
Vela was also certain to note his support of science and space initiatives, such as SpaceX.
“Additionally, I am committed to leveraging my position on the House Agriculture Committee and the House Armed Services Committee to achieve local priorities on behalf of our producers, and men and women in uniform,” Vela further stated. “I look forward to continuing to work across the aisle to deliver results on our local priorities and remaining as accessible and transparent as possible.”
