Even when he had less than a month left to serve, he was nothing less than a loose cannon, wielding his power in extreme ways, inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol, anything he could do to overturn his decisive loss to Joe Biden. It was shocking to watch Donald Trump and his supporters attempt to overturn the election over unfounded claims of election fraud, even after all the lawsuits had all been dismissed. As one of the communities directly affected by Trump’s central campaign promise, the way Vela legislates on these issues is crucial.Like many people in the United States, I voted in the 2020 election, then witnessed the assault on the electoral process that is fundamental to our democracy. And as one of three Democrats representing the Valley in Congress, each budget deadline since 2016 has been a battle against border wall funding. Just last week Vela gave a speech on the House floor calling out the Trump administration for it's "Remain in Mexico" policy, which has c aused asylum seekers to wait under extreme circumstances for their cases to be heard. “And I’m like, ‘No, actually, things are OK.’” “Often, people will ask me ‘Oh, how are things down there? Things are looking tough down there,’” he said. That stewardship follows him to the halls of the Capitol. He often has to rebuke the narrative that the Valley is a dangerous place, while also being the one who has to show around his colleagues when they visit and see the worst that happening there. Much of the battle, Vela said, is optics. “I think he realizes that he’s on the right side of the major issues, whether or not people pay attention to his record.” … It plays well politically,” Garrett said. Solomon Ortiz, a Democrat who had represented Brownsville and Corpus Christi.Īfter her loss, Saenz-Blanchard told the Associated Press, "We now have a Republican who has converted to being a Democrat who I believe is taking a seat from the Democrats." Vela essentially clinched his seat in a primary runoff against Denise Saenz-Blanchard, the former chief of staff to former U.S. And his wife, Rose Vela, was a Republican judge at the time he first ran for Congress, something Vela's opponents noted when they tried to pin him as too moderate. "But considering the Hispanic population in the country we are still underrepresented from a national standpoint we still have to break through the same barrier that my parents had to in Texas.”īoth of Vela's parents were known as conservative Blue Dog Democrats. "The Valley was largely Hispanic and had no Hispanic representation," Vela said of the time when his parents rose to power. She was later remembered as “feminist trailblazer” in a front-page obituary on the Brownsville Herald. In 1999, his mother, Blanca Vela, was elected as the first female mayor of Brownsville. Nine years later, Vela’s father was appointed to the federal bench by President Jimmy Carter. In 1971, Vela’s father won a seat on the Brownsville City Commission, joining the wave of Hispanics elevated to public office in the Valley in the years after the poll tax was abolished. A middle school and federal court building in the city are named after his father, a late federal court judge with the same name. But to voters in Brownsville, his name was far from new. Vela was a political newcomer when he ran for a newly created Congressional seat in 2012. That might come as a surprise to some of his early critics. When he's criticizing his own party, it's often from the left. 'We now have a Republican who has converted to being a Democrat' Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee “is now in complete chaos” after several black and Hispanic members of Congress voiced concerns over lack of diversity in the DCCC and called for Chairwoman Cheri Bustos to replace the executive director of the DCCC with a person of color. A year earlier, he told reporters, “I think you’d have to be an idiot to think we could win the House with Pelosi at the top." Last year, he was one of 16 Democrats in Congress who opposed Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. Vela hasn't exclusively focused his ire on Republicans, though.
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