The San Antonio Food Bank was a beehive of activity, and everyone looked haggard. This was the first time my district director, Stacy Arteaga, and I had been together since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic began. After entering the building, we had our temperature taken by a woman who had the same look on her face as the Marine Security Guards I served with in the CIA when they were on watch all night. Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper and his director of government relations looked like they had been getting three hours of sleep a night.
COVID-19 slammed so hard into South Texas that people were running out of food. A few days before this meeting, Eric and his team had held a food distribution at an outdoor market where ten thousand cars waited hours in line for emergency food aid. A drone photo of the packed parking lot went viral.
“We can’t feed this many” was Eric’s first thought when he realized several thousand more people had showed up to the food distribution than had signed up. “Our country will see real desperation and chaos if people become afraid they can’t feed their families.”
Eric and his team explained how children on free and reduced-price lunch programs had lost access to meals because of school shutdowns. Seventy-five percent of kids who needed these programs weren’t getting food. Parents were desperate.
Families weren’t receiving access to emergency food aid included in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act—one of three huge COVID relief packages a bipartisan Congress passed in the early weeks of the crisis.
It required the Secretary of Agriculture to approve a state agency plan for temporary emergency relief, and somewhere in the system, things had slowed down for Texas. We did some investigating and then some pushing and, shortly thereafter, Texas received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide more than $1 billion in pandemic food benefits. It didn’t solve all the crises we were dealing with during the pandemic, but a lot fewer kids went hungry.
Would the people we helped know my team and I were involved? Would they ever vote for a Republican? Would the people we helped vote at all? We didn’t know and didn’t care to ask. A representative doesn’t represent just the people in his or her party. A representative is supposed to represent everyone. A problem was preventing parents from feeding their kids, so we helped solve it. Unfortunately, many elected officials fail to focus on solvable problems plaguing our communities because the problem lacks appeal among the loudest voices within their constituency.
The loudest voices are usually the most passionate. They dominate social media, and their perspectives get the most exposure on cable news. Even though the fringes on either side usually only make up a minority of general election voters, they push mainstream institutions into hyper-political positions that are out of touch with most of society, because they are oftentimes the largest block of voters in a primary. These people are on the extreme edges of both parties. An example within the GOP are those who believe the QAnon conspiracy theories that Hillary Clinton is part of a pedophile ring, and in the Democratic party, it’s the people who advocate literally for abolishing the police. Sometimes these extremists on the edge get confused with “the Base”—the people who will only vote for a single party’s candidates in general elections. While people on the edges would never vote for a candidate from the opposing party, they may not vote in a particular election if they don’t believe the candidate is sufficiently “liberal” or “conservative.”
Prior to Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican nominee for president in 2016, the GOP was an amalgamation of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security hawks. How you define these categories depends on the time period you are talking about. For some insights, we can turn to the pollster Tony Fabrizio, who has worked for a number of politicians for almost three decades. He has conducted three national polls since 1997 about the attitudes and views of the members of the Republican Party.
In the late ’90s, a fiscal conservative could have been a deficit hawk who believed in reducing the federal deficit at all costs, including increasing taxes. Or a fiscal conservative could have meant a supply-sider—someone who believed the most important act the federal government could make was to cut taxes.
In the mid-2000s, social conservatives could have been moralists who were the successors of Ralph Reed/Pat Robertson Republicans (respectively the first executive director of the Christian Coalition and former Southern Baptist minister turned born-again Christian televangelist), who were primarily concerned about issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Or social conservatives could have been “Dennis Miller Republicans” (named after the Saturday Night Live alumnus turned political commentator/talk show host) who cared the most about illegal immigration and strongly opposed people gaming the system to get a “free lunch” and had mixed opinions on the issues of homosexuality or abortion.
In the current era, a national security hawk could mean a “border and order” Republican who cares about building a wall along our southern border and responds to law-and-order messaging or a neocon who favors a large military and believes the U.S. should be outward-facing on a global scale.
Further complicating the various segments that constitute the Republican Party is that after Donald Trump’s election and defeat, an argument can be made that the Republican Party is made up of tribes based on their level of satisfaction with, and opinion of, the former president. However, the boundaries between these various ideological groups are not fixed. Within each of these segments exists those on the edge who believe it’s either “my way or the highway.”
A similar analysis could be performed on the Democratic Party, but the concept of the base and the edge are the same.
Understanding the edge matters because those on the edge get a disproportionate amount of attention from elected officials since they have historically been the largest individual block of voters who consistently vote in primaries. This focus contributes to a toxic political culture because so many races are decided by the winner of the primary from the party that is dominant in that district.
Going into the 2020 election cycle, only thirty-four House seats were considered split districts, meaning that in the previous presidential election, the candidate who won the congressional district was from a different party than the district’s selection for president. Thirty-one Democrats represented districts that Donald Trump won in 2016 and only three Republicans represented districts won by Hillary Clinton. That is thirty-four out of 435 members of the House of Representatives—roughly 8 percent.
After the 2020 election, only sixteen split districts are still standing—seven Democrats hold districts that Donald Trump won and nine Republicans are serving in seats where the majority of those voters selected Joe Biden for president.
But go back twenty years: 86 seats were competitive. Twenty years before that, 143 seats were. This was back in the day when problems got solved through bipartisanship. Competitive seats create problem solvers because they force politicians to appeal to a cross-section of their district, not just those who show up in a partisan primary. Noncompetitive seats create bomb throwers.
In 2018, an average of 54,000 people voted in contested primaries, meaning a primary election for either a Republican or Democrat where there was more than one person a voter could select from on the ballot. This reality means a minimum of only 27,001 people decided who was going to represent their district. During my time in Congress, a member represented over 700,000 people, so in 92 percent of congressional districts, only 3 percent of the population decided who would get the opportunity to go to Washington, DC. In the 8 percent of competitive districts, roughly 265,000 people voted in the general election for their representative, meaning a minimum of 132,501 folks picked the winner. Would you rather have 27,001 or 132,501 deciding who goes to Congress?
Since 92 percent of districts are decided by the most partisan political blocs, then they are the only people who get spoken to, because professional political consultants advise candidates that if these voters don’t vote for you, then you can’t win. This fuels extremism.
That doesn’t have to be the case. It’s not like a majority of Americans are cool with our veterans returning home to lousy medical care or an immigration system that’s still broken. When serious problems go unaddressed, people feel like they’re not being heard or even ignored. The gridlock we experience in Washington is not because our problems are too complicated to solve, it’s because there are too many people who appeal to the edges and won’t work together.
Building coalitions, working with your political adversaries to find win-win solutions, has gotten a bad name. Some would even say it’s old-fashioned. Folks who try this are scorned as “moderates.”
I’ve hated labels my entire life. Don’t tell me who I am, what I am, what I can do. And the word “moderate” annoys me. Oxford Languages says the adjective “moderate” means “average in amount, intensity, quality, or degree.” While moderates generally do reflect the opinions of the supermajority of Americans, or the average American, moderates aren’t average. The term is used as a pejorative synonym for squishy. It doesn’t suggest boldness or ideological consistency. Most people using the term don’t understand what really happens in politics. The moderates are the ones who behave the same way regardless of whether their party is in power or not. The moderates are critical to crafting and passing legislation that actually gets signed into law. The moderates are the ones who work the hardest.
Congressional representatives like me, who were in competitive seats, are the ones who actually have to campaign in our districts. We take a Republican message to communities where it’s never been articulated. We are the ones taking ideas to people who don’t agree with us.
Ideologues only have to talk to themselves, and it’s easy to preach to that choir. But moderates have to change hearts and minds. We appeal to the middle—not the fringes—of the political spectrum.
And we are the ones who get shit done. Extremists do the most bitching and get the least accomplished.
Terrified parents trying to feed their families don’t need ideologues. They need help—fast—from a Congress working together in a bipartisan fashion to pass bills to find solutions to the crises engulfing the country.
Our brothers and sisters in the military don’t need idealogues. They need a federal government that can provide them with the tools, training, and facilities to enable them to defend our homeland.
One of the first bills I got signed into law originated from a stop at one of the forerunners to my DC2DQ trips. There, a civilian from Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, west of San Antonio on the U.S.-Mexico border, raised his hand to tell me that the Laughlin airfield flooded after only one inch of rain and became unusable.
Laughlin produces more pilots than any facility in the country. So one inch of rain and they couldn’t train pilots? That was crazy. Afterward, the guy showed me some aerial photos of what he was talking about. After a rainstorm, the area looked like a bathtub and the planes looked like toys floating in the water. No political leader had bothered to do anything about it for decades. It took us longer than we expected, but we were able to fix the problem.
Americans getting their digital information stolen on an almost daily basis also don’t need ideologues. They need protection. When I got to Congress, I never thought I’d end up being the IT procurement expert. It’s not exactly a sexy topic. But I was shocked to learn that the federal government spent $80 billion on buying IT goods and services—computers, software, and so on. And 80 percent of that money was spent on systems that any reasonable person would consider outdated.
How old? One example: The U.S. Department of Labor had a thirty-year-old system developed by people who were all dead. They had to resort to looking for old parts on eBay.
So I collaborated with Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) and Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) on the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, signed into law by President Trump in December 2017. The MGT was designed to bring the government’s IT systems into the twenty-first century by establishing an IT modernization fund at executive branch agencies so they could upgrade their technology systems. No more hunting through eBay for parts.
These are the types of solutions Americans want. On my trips through the 23rd, questions I got the most weren’t about impeachment or Robert Mueller or whatever was obsessing Washington or the media at the time.
Instead, people asked: “Why won’t DC get things done?” and “Why can’t people work together?”
The reason little gets done in DC is largely because most candidates have to win elections by creating contrast, which fuels political and personal contempt. And if you win elections by throwing bombs and creating contrast, what do you do when it’s time to legislate? Throw bombs and create contrast. But the contempt created from the bomb throwing and contrast making prevents us from solving the generation-defining challenges facing us as a country at home and abroad.
In his 2019 book Love Your Enemies, Arthur C. Brooks points out how political differences are ripping our country apart because of a culture of contempt—divisive politicians, along with screaming heads on TV, polarizing columnists, crazy social media posts, rants, and feuds. They stoke our own biases while affirming our worst assumptions about those who disagree with us. It makes political compromise—a dirty word in DC—and progress impossible.
A perfect example was Washington’s failed attempt at police reform legislation after the horrific police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and well over one hundred other African Americans in 2020.
When David Dorn, a seventy-seven-year-old, retired African American police captain, was killed by looters, and several other officers in St. Louis, New York, and Las Vegas were shot at during protests, the far right felt justified to view all peaceful protesters as looters and criminals. Around the same time, the far left began their outrageous demands to defund and even abolish the police. With such extreme positions gaining traction, two factions that were mutually exclusive began to develop in Congress—one pro-police and one pro–racial justice. The bipartisan outrage that emerged from seeing the video of George Floyd’s murder failed to coalesce into legislative action because a more nuanced position would be seen by one faction as tacit approval of the other’s extreme position.
When my team and I put forward ideas on how to address policing reform, we knew three things: First, the way to improve policing is not by defunding the police but by ensuring federal dollars flowing to law enforcement are used in the most effective way to improve training. Second, we should clarify federal law to ensure that law enforcement officers can be held accountable in court for actions violating Americans’ civil rights. And third, we have to empower police chiefs to fire bad officers and keep them off the force permanently, which is an action made difficult by pushback from some police unions.
My good friend Pete Aguilar (D-California) had let me know that the Congressional Black Caucus—an all-Democrat organization—was taking the lead for the Democrats in drafting legislation, and they wanted my input.
The White House reached out to me to explain they were moving ahead with an executive order offering new federal incentives for local police to bolster training and create a national database to track misconduct. But there was nothing in it about firing bad cops.
At the same time, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy asked me to participate in a Republican-only call to develop our ideas addressing police reform.
On the call, Rep. Pete Stauber, a former professional hockey player and Minnesota police officer, cut right to the point. Police chiefs needed to be able to fire bad cops and keep them off the force, he said. He had an idea—two independent arbitrators had to agree to reinstate a fired police officer. A smart solution to a huge problem that both sides could have agreed on. Sixty leaders of the largest local law enforcement organizations in the United States penned an open letter explaining how contracts and labor laws hamstrung efforts to swiftly rid departments of problematic officers.
I laid out my three points and explained that, as Republicans fighting for civil liberties, we should be on the forefront of this issue because a police officer was taking away a fellow citizen’s ultimate civil liberty—the right to live. I added that we should be as outraged, if not more, by what happened to George Floyd than what happened to Carter Page. For months before the George Floyd murder, Republicans were incredibly vocal about the FBI’s violation of the civil liberties of Page. He was a former investment banker and foreign policy adviser for President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who had his electronic communications secretly, and illegally, targeted by the FBI. If you were irate by the spying on Carter Page, then you should be irate about George Floyd’s fate.
I spoke with colleagues spearheading both the Senate Republican police reform initiative and the House version. Republicans and Democrats recognized the need to empower police chiefs to fire bad cops. But both Republicans and Democrats were afraid of potential electoral blowback by going against police unions, which are geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety.
The Senate version didn’t even include many provisions in the planned executive order, and the Democrat bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, didn’t go far enough to solve problems. But in the House, with the Democrats in power and with more than 218 co-sponsors, they didn’t have to take any suggestions from Republicans.
I ultimately voted for the Democrat’s bill, one of only three Republicans who did, because I will take something over nothing. It would have banned choke holds, no-knock warrants in drug cases, and made it easier to pursue claims against police officers in civil court. But it didn’t empower police chiefs to permanently fire bad cops. A lost opportunity. The bill died in the Senate. There would be no bipartisan nor bicameral police reform bill.
The reality is that no matter who is in office, the only way we can solve problems is together. In this polarized age, appealing to the middle and forsaking the edges can seem like a sure way to political ruin. However, appealing to the edges is un-pragmatic because most Americans, and most of the world, are craving solutions to their problems, not just people complaining about them. Most people’s idealism manifests in their desire to believe in something larger than themselves. This hunger can only be satisfied when we have leaders who inspire, not fearmonger.