The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Texas Republican Exits the House

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

An exodus is under way in the House of Representatives: not even halfway into the congressional term, fifteen Republicans have announced that they will not run in 2020. One of the exiting members is Will Hurd, a former C.I.A. officer who was elected in 2014. His district in Texas includes nearly a third of the state’s border with Mexico. Although he is reluctant to criticize the G.O.P. directly, Hurd tells the Washington correspondent Susan B. Glasser that he thinks the President’s border policy is ineffective: a wall isn’t the answer, Border Patrol is underfunded relative to the area it covers, and the technology in use for border security is both out of date and overly complicated, “requiring a Ph.D. in computer science to operate,” he says. “I wish I could pass a piece of legislation,” Hurd tells Glasser, “that says you can’t talk about the border unless you’ve been down to the border a few times.” Hurd’s departure is particularly significant because he is—for the sixteen months he has left to serve—the only African-American in the House Republican caucus, and he worries that the President’s negative rhetoric toward people of color is contributing to a demographic shift that’s turning Texas from deep red to purple. “When you have statements the equivalent of, ‘go back to Africa,’ ” Hurd notes, “that is not helpful.” Plus, two leading environmental writers, Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert, wonder if the new sense of urgency around climate change is coming too late.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This coming Friday, September 20th, millions of people are expected to leave their classrooms or their jobs or however they spend their days and march to demand action from government leaders on climate change. With every record-setting heat wave, with every extreme storm, it's harder to deny the reality. Climate change is here, right now, and it's already causing us urgent problems. Two of our contributors have been sounding the alarm for decades.

Bill McKibbon essentially broke the news of climate change to a wider public with his book The End of Nature, and that work was first published in The New Yorker in 1989. And staff writer Elizabeth Colbert, who covers climate change for the New Yorker, wrote The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize. We spoke earlier this year just after the UN published a report that one million species are at risk of extinction.

Betsy, I hate to be a competitive journalist, but when I read the report about the sixth extinction and the UN report, I said the New Yorker had that 10 years ago when you published in 2009, the very same thing. What is the difference between 2009 and 2019 in terms of the extinction of hundreds of thousands of thousands of species on the planet Earth? Well, I think that, I mean, it's one of those cases where, you know, as I'm sure Bill would say, you don't sort of like to see the news bearing out what you said. But in this case, you know, it really is. The only difference is, you know, more documented destruction, really.

And a lot more studies piled on the ones, you know, that were available to us, five, 10 years ago, but, you know, the general trend line of biodiversity lost, it's all just playing out, you know, sort of according to plan, unfortunately. And it's true that, you know, global GDP is larger than ever. And at the same time, you know, species loss and destruction of the natural environment, natural world is also greater than ever. And those two things are very intimately linked. And if you only pay attention, you know, to the GDP part, you might say, oh, everything's fine. But I think what the point that this report is really trying to make is those lines are going to cross. You know, people are still dependent on the natural world.

All the oxygen we breathe, all the food we eat, all the water. You know, these are biological and geochemical systems that we're still dependent on for better or worse. And we are mucking with them in the most profound ways. I think that that is the message, the take-home message of that report. Bill, I was really interested to read that you think that the great, climate change document of our time is by Pope Francis? Well, I think that the encyclical that he wrote three and a half years ago now, La Dotto C, is amazing, mostly because though it takes off from climate change,

it's actually a fairly thorough and remarkable critique of modernity. And it talks really about precisely the things that Betsy's been talking about. understanding this as, yes, a problem of physics and of the need to put up a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, which we now can do because the engineers have made them affordable, but also understanding it as a problem of human beings and their relations with each other. As Francis points out, you know, the last 40 years, this period of time when we've worshipped markets and assumed they solved all problems, has not only spiked the temperature. through the roof. It spiked inequality through the roof, and the two are not unrelated.

How are they related? What is the essential relationship between the two? One of the things I spent some time doing in this new book is kind of teasing out the history that begins with Ayn Rand and kind of reaches a first zenith in the Reagan administration. and the idea that government is the problem, that if you leave corporations alone, they'll get done what needs doing. This reigning ideology came just at the wrong moment. It came at precisely the moment

when we actually needed governments to be doing something very strong to deal with climate change. And that combination of ideology and interest has been enough to suppress our reactions in the crucial, 30 years. I mean, David, we're basically out of presidential cycles in order to deal with this problem. How do you mean? What's the math on it? The UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

issued their most recent report, and it was by far their most pointed to date. It said if really fundamentally transformative work was not well underway by 2030, then we were not going to catch up with the math of climate change. Physics was going to just be too far ahead. And this race. And you know enough about political life in this country or any other to know that a decade is a short period of time. If we want to have anything substantial happening in a decade, then we have got to be doing it right away. You know, for nearly 20 years that I've been working together with Betsy, the running joke between us is about Betsy's pessimism, which is well-founded, but we managed to joke about it anyway. And Bill, early on in Fulter, your new book

you write, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. And I sense in both of you, each in your own way. And it might be different, but each in your own way, some sense of hope is informing your work now in 2019 the way it might not of five years ago. Am I right, Betsy? He said, he said. I hope I haven't given you that impression, Dave. He said, hopefully.

Hopefully the dog came home. I think, you know, I, no, I'm going to be, I'll play my usual role here. Eeyore. You know, I, yeah, I, I think that I do, I do see glimmers of hope on a political front, but it's sort of like mountains after mountains after mountains. and I think, as I say, the facts on the ground, climate change, the thing that distinguishes it from a lot of other environmental problems is it's cumulative. You know, it's not something where you can say at the moment you don't like things, you know, let's undo them. There's a lot of time lag in the system.

There's a lot of inertia in the system. And we are squaring around. In the system, meaning in science. No, in the climate system, in the climate system. So we have not yet experienced the full impact of the greenhouse greenhouse. gases we have already put up there. And once we do, you know, in whatever, a decade or so, there's a sort of a long tail to that, you know, we will have put up that much more. So we're always chasing this problem. And you can't decide, once we decide, oh, we really don't like

this climate, you don't get to the old climate back for, you know, many, many, many generations. So we are fighting a very, very, very uphill battle. And I think, you know, the point that that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is it maybe we can avoid, you know, the worst possible future, but I don't think at this point we can avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage. And we're seeing it already. We're seeing it, but it's just beginning. And it's not just beginning. Just beginning.

And then we can turn it around. It's just beginning. And a lot more is built in. What can be held back, Bill, and what can't be held back at this point? Well, I mean, look, Betsy's right. the problem with climate change is that it's a timed test. And if you don't solve it fast, then you don't solve it. No one's got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it's melted. And we've lost now 70 or 80 percent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic. So that's a tipping point

more or less crossed. The oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they used to. So we're not playing for stopping climate change. We're playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn't make civilizations impossible. I mean, here's the hopeful case if you want it. 50 years ago next spring, we had the first Earth Day in 1970, 20 million people, one in ten of the then American population, went into the street. And that anger transformed the flavor of this issue in America. Over the next four years, Richard Nixon,

who had not an environmental bone in his body, signed every piece of legislation on which we still depend. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act that Betsy described as now under siege. Those all came because of that outpouring of public energy that shifted the zeitgeist. We better do it again and in spades. Elizabeth Colbert, Bill McKibben,

authors of really the essential works on climate change these last 30 years. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. Thank you, David. Friday, September 20th, is the climate strike taking place around the world. And the UN's Climate Action Summit starts Friday as well. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. An exodus seems to be underway in the House of Representatives. We're not even halfway into the congressional term, and 15 Republicans have already announced their retirements ahead of the 2020 elections. One member making for the exits is Will Hurd, a former CIA officer who once managed undercover operations in Afghanistan. Hurd was elected from a district in Texas in 2014,

and he's seen as a moderate. His announcement is significant because Hurd is, for the 16 months he has left to serve, the only African-American in the House Republican Caucus. Our Washington correspondent, Susan Glasser, caught up with Will Hurd last week at his office on Capitol Hill. So, Congressman, national security is one of your abiding interests, and obviously it's the through line between your unique service as an undercover CIA agent and a member of Congress. We're in the middle

of yet another upheaval on President Trump's national security team. He's now dumped his third national security advisor, and who knows, you know, who will replace John Bolton or what that means in terms of the administration's foreign policy, the backdrop to this latest round of chaos is Ambassador Bolton apparently objecting to the president's plan to bring the Taliban to camp David. It's wild. And I would... These were the guys shooting at you. No, absolutely. And these are the guys that are still shooting at our men and women in the military, but also our allies. And that's what makes outrageous. So I think everybody agrees that being able to decrease our posture in Afghanistan specifically would be a positive thing. However, we can't ever let that place become a location

where terrorists can train, equip, and continue to attack on the homeland. Now, when we negotiate with a group of people, you can't give everything away and get nothing in return. So they were negotiating in bad faith, the Taliban I'm speaking of, by continuing and do attacks while you're trying to negotiate an agreement. I do believe when you're talking, you're not fighting generally, in this case, that may not necessarily be the case. And knowing Ambassador Bolton, I'm sure he was, like me, outraged by this idea. And I would, I think if I read the tea leaves, I don't think the right verb we should be using is, anything relating to firing, I think John Bolton decided that this was not his, not something that he can continue to do.

You know, often in conversations in Washington, there's a difficulty of, you know, sort of bridging the gap between the national security conversation, the foreign policy world, and then the sort of political world, domestic politics. You've physically straddled that line, I think, you know, by representing a district on the border with Mexico. And one of the things that you've most consistently spoken out about, over the last couple years is this vexing question of President Trump's border wall, both the existence and need for it, which you've been opposed to,

and then also the question of how he's gone about funding it, the question of why immigration reform, while broadly supported until very recently by people in public parties, has been impossible to achieve. So what is Washington screwing up about this? What do they get wrong about your district? Well, I wish I could pass them. a piece of legislation that says you can't talk about the border unless you've been down to the border a few times because if that was required for expertise in Washington we'd be in trouble

look every mile of the border is different from every other mile I represent 820 miles of the border it's about two-thirds of the border between um uh Texas and Mexico and you go almost from the San Antonio suburbs to El Paso, right? So along the border, the town is called Eagle Pass all the way to El Paso. And there are parts of the border where Border Patrol's response time to a threat is measured in hours to days. So if you have a threat and it's going to take the good guys, it's going to take them hours to get there, a wall is actually not a physical barrier. It's a colossal. waste of money. And so building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. We should be using more technology. And unfortunately,

most people believe that we have the greatest, the latest and greatest technology along the border. Unfortunately, it's like 20 years old. And a lot of these tools that we have down there, you have to have a PhD in computer science in order for it to operate. So the people, the men and women that are putting themselves in harm's way in order to protect our border, don't have the resources they need. We also need more men and women in board patrol. We don't have enough. And so we can secure our border. Another way, what we should be operating on it, and when you look at the humanitarian crisis that we're dealing with right now, and the number of illegal folks that are coming into our country, it's going to be the highest has been a really long time.

President Trump calls that an invasion. Is it an invasion? Look, is it illegal? I would say it's illegal immigration, right? That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the accurate word. And the root, we have to address the root causes of the problem. The root causes of the problem is violence, lack of economic opportunity, and extreme poverty in the Northern Triangle. That's El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And what we should be doing is leading with American soft power in those areas. That's economic and development aid to help restructure many of those, many of those countries. because it's a fraction of the cost to solve the problem there before having to deal with it when it actually gets to our borders.

We should be getting the entire Western Hemisphere involved in solving this problem. Is opposition to the wall, is that one of the reasons driving this incredible exodus of Texas Republicans like yourself out of the House of Representatives? You're one now, I believe it's five Republican members, many of whom are pretty senior, who have made a decision not to run again for re-election. What's going on there? No, it doesn't have anything to do with my decision or my positions. I've, you know, for me, it's real simple.

The president of the United States is not my boss. The speaker of the house is not my boss, right? My bosses are the 800,000 people that I represent. And I agree when I agree. I disagree when I disagree. I did it under the last president. I've done it under this president. And so for me, I believe it's an opportunity for me to serve my country in a different

way. I haven't talked to the other members of the Texas delegation about their decision, but these are positions. We shouldn't want someone staying in these positions for decades. I've always said to do the job well, you have a shelf life for six, seven, eight years because of the travel and the activity. And so this was a logical time for me. And I also want to help candidates across the country that would have been great part for me when I was up here and the way to do that is to go in and help those candidates in their districts and do that across the country. So I'm looking forward to doing that in this and this upcoming election cycle because here's the reality as a Republican. And I tell this to my colleagues in Texas and this is applicable for the rest of the country. If the Republican Party in Texas doesn't start looking like Texas, there won't be a Republican Party in Texas. And in 2020, Texas is a purple state, meaning, you know, in essence, a basketball reference. It's a jump ball. Democrats can win. Just because there's not a statewide elected Democrat in Texas. Which, by the way, is an amazing

statement in and of itself. I remember when we first started Politico magazine a few years ago, actually right when you came to Congress in 2014, and we ran an article that said, Texas is going to become a purple state. And people were like, that's crazy. That's crazy. It was not viewed as a successful piece of political analysis. No, but it's true. And so when he looked at, and so, when he look at who are the two largest growing groups of voters, minorities and young people, people under the age of 29 will be a third of the electorate in 2020. These are places where the Republican brand doesn't resonate as well as it could and should. And there's an opportunity, right? There's an opportunity because independents and Democrats are concerned with the direction

that their party is going. And so there's an opportunity here. And I truly believe that a competition of ideas is important for us to be able to meet these generational defining challenges that are at our doorstep. Well, it's interesting. You talk about opportunity. We're sitting behind in your office here. You've got a framed copy of Texas Monthly cover that has you on the cover recently as party of one. And I mentioned you're the only African-American Republican in the House of Representatives. They'll be zero when you're gone. There's one in the Senate. And you also have to, you're this incredibly turbocharged rhetoric that we've been seeing, no less from the Twitter feed of the President of the United States, being very critical of some of your fellow members of

Congress who are women of color. Is it possible to recruit Republicans of color, given this political moment? It is, and there's some good Republican canons of color that are running across the country. There's a guy in Houston, Texas named Wesley Hunt, who's phenomenal, right? time than military. Does it make it more difficult to go to communities that hasn't seen a Republican? Yes. But that's what I've been doing for the last, you know, for my five, my five years, five and a half years in Congress. And so I'm going to continue to do that because our message should resonate. But but here's, here's the problem. If people don't trust you or people don't think you care about them, they're not going to listen to what you say. Well, so I, you know,

In the course of the years that you've been campaigning across this incredibly far-flung, very competitive district, which is an outlier just not only in its size, but because it is competitive between the parties, how has it changed? I mean, has the Republican Party's brand, you think, become more challenging in a district like that because of demographic change, or is it also been accelerated by the politics of the Trump era? Look, I think when you have statements that talk about, you know, the equivalent of go back to Africa, right? That is not helpful. And that takes away from the opportunity, which is to debate whether free markets or socialism is the way you're going to solve problems in the future.

And so when you're taking away and making it harder to have those real substantial, debates, that's not going to help us electorally. But what I have found is, you know, look, I spend time in areas that people never saw a Republican, and they appreciate that. And that's why I've consistently been successful in a, in a blue wave when, you know, people that weren't very popular on top of the ticket were involved. And so that's how we've been able to survive. And that's proof that the majority of Americans are willing to vote for someone, for an individual, not just because they have a letter after their name. And I've been able to prove that in my three terms.

Now, I have to ask you one final question, because I feel like it's an important one. You know, many people are surprised at how little many of your fellow Republicans have spoken out against the president, even though he disagrees with things that they see as fundamental. issues of principle. Are you going to support Donald Trump for re-election in 2020? And do you think that you would have a duty or responsibility to speak out about your concerns about his fitness for office? My plan right now is to vote for the Republican nominee. And I'm going to continue to evaluate and speak up and, you know, agree when I agree and disagree when I disagree. So we'll be hearing from you a lot then.

I'm not bashful. No, absolutely not. Congressman Will Hurd. Thank you again. Here we are. The pleasure was mine. The Cannon House Office Building. 317. Representative Will Hurd of Texas. In August, he announced his retirement from Congress. Susan Glasser writes the weekly column Letter from Trump's Washington and New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time. We've got a special show coming up. I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say it's high time. that we tackled a budding industry.

That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, and Stephen Valentino,

with help from Meng Fei-Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.