AUSTIN, Texas - America is at risk for political violence and disputed elections regardless of who wins in November, a Texas House Republican who's been attacked by his own party argued on Thursday.
“Let's say Donald Trump wins — half the country is going to go insane. Let's say, Kamala Harris wins, half the country is going to go insane,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told The Texas Tribune Festival.
“So regardless, this January we’re going to be in a very difficult spot — which is why I think it’s so important for the House to lead.”
Gonzales is a self-described “wild card” who has faced censure from the GOP and a heated and expensive primary challenge from his right after voting for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
That’s the kind of backlash Gonzales argued that House members must be more willing to grapple with, rather than blaming the other party — something he accused both parties of comprehensively failing to do during this Congress.
“Part of rolling up your sleeves and finding the solution is that the problem gets on you. You get your hands dirty,” he said.
“It’s easy to go, I don’t want to touch it — that’s somebody else’s issue, I’ll blame someone else for what’s wrong.”
As a case in point, Gonzales pointed to the failure of restrictive Senate border legislation in May. Gonzales argued against prevailing political narratives that attribute the bill’s collapse to Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
That blame, Gonzales argued, is misapplied — a misunderstanding of how the Senate put together a package that was too complicated to pass.
“The Senate killed the Senate’s border deal,” he said.
”The scene in the House is Democrats are my opposition, but the true enemy is the Senate,” he added. “Let’s get the Senate to do its job.”
As an example of a poison pill for his party, he pointed to Senate bill language — that later made it into Biden’s executive order — that allowed “thousands of people to come over illegally before we enact it," he said.
"That's wrong. The number should always be zero. Whether you can get to zero or not doesn't matter. The number has to be zero,” Gonzales added.
But the bigger issue, he argued, is structural. “The bigger the package, the more reason someone can say, Hey, I like the [first] 400 pages, but page 401 — I just can't be there, right? There’s always a reason to vote no.”
Gonzales said he fields continuous calls from other members of the House or Senate with “this great idea on how we fix the border. [But] the ideas are already there. I don’t need more ideas. We need political courage.”
Congress, Gonzales argued, needs to ask “what can the politics handle? And I think the politics can handle about five to seven pages right now.”
He pointed to his H–2 Improvements to Relieve Employers (HIRE) Act — a three-page bill with 23 Republican and 14 Democratic co-sponsors — which would make work visas valid for three years. That level of ambition is about “all the politics can handle,” Gonzales said. “Other people want more — but I think you have to start somewhere. You have to crawl before you can walk — you have to walk before you can run.”
Gonzales, whose district includes a vast swath of the Texas-Mexico border, argued that the changing character of migration had rattled many of his constituents, who were “used to illegal immigration.”
“I met with one rancher. She goes, 'Look, this is sweet, Tony. I had someone come from Russia, someone come from China, someone come from the Middle East, someone come from Central America'” — as opposed to past decades, when they were more likely to be job-seekers from Mexico.
Other language in the Senate bill — like protections for Dreamers, or the undocumented migrants who came to the U.S. as children — “make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but people also have to feel safe.”
To that end, Gonzales defended Johnson's push for the SAVE Act, which would require voters to show proof of citizenship, and which the Speaker has said he is willing to shut down the government over.
While voting by noncitizens is uncommon and already illegal, Gonzales argued that the U.S. voting process faced a crisis of legitimacy.
"You can lose an election, but if you don't believe in election, there's nothing more dangerous. So whether noncitizens are voting or not, really doesn't matter. People have to know that noncitizens aren't voting. So why can't we come together and make sure?"
Gonzales, who was the only Texas Republican to vote to enshrine same-sex marriage, also criticized Republicans for the party’s turn against LGBTQ rights.
From his time in the military, Gonzales said, he had learned not to “care who you pray to. I don't care who you go to bed with. I don't care any of that."
Instead, he said, “I want you to be a productive member of society, and if you are, then you're on the team, and there has to be protections for it. So I think our Republican message needs to be one that welcomes those that have conservative values, regardless of whatever else is going on. And we can't be the party that that alienates folks, and we want to win — and we want to win in Texas or other places — we have to be the party that does that.”
Similarly, he argued that the nation is too divided on abortion rights to pass legislation either banning or enshrining them — but suggested there is “low-hanging fruit,” like a bill he is working on that would strengthen foster care.
“That's not sexy, the foster care bill, but these are the types of things I think Congress should be doing.”
