Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) sent President Joe Biden a message on where he could look to solve the migrant crisis at the southern border: the House of Representatives.
On CBS News Face the Nation, Gonzales addressed the now twice-failed bipartisan Senate border bill and criticized President Joe Biden for the lack of conversation with House leadership in terms of a border bill. Gonzales’s district, Texas Congressional District 23, runs along the majority of Texas’s border with Mexico.
“Now if Joe Biden wants to secure this thing long term, I think he needs to stop looking at the Senate for a solution and look to the House,” Gonzales said. “I think there’s opportunities; HR-2 is a good start.”
Gonzales claimed Biden had not “really” discussed the matter with anyone in the House.
“The president has not had any real conversations with anyone in the House,” Gonzales said.
He said the Biden administration had been in talks with Senate leadership regarding the bipartisan border bill, but suggested it might be more worth the President’s efforts to speak to House leadership.
“The Senate, yes, they’ve [the Biden administration] sat down, they’ve had these conversations, but in the House, they’ve given no oxygen to it. This is different than in years past,” Gonzales said.
The House, which is facing historically high levels of unproductiveness, has not voted on any border legislation recently.
“The House is where I believe you start if you truly want to solve it. Now if you want to make it about politics and just blame someone else, then you hold it in the Senate, and you say ‘we’re trying, we’re doing the best we can.’”
Last week, Senate majority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) put the bipartisan Senate border bill up for a second vote after the first one failed to pass. Many marked this move as a political prop as it failed for the second time.
“Today is not a bill. Today is a prop. Today is a political messaging exercise,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said ahead of the vote. “That doesn’t help us as a country.”
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Schumer said he wanted to put the bill up for a vote to highlight former President Donald Trump’s efforts to kill the bill the first time around.
“People want us to get things done. People want us to come together. And when they hear that the only reason Republicans backed away from this bill is not that it wasn’t strong enough, but that Donald Trump said he wanted chaos at the border, they don’t like that,” Schumer said Thursday on the floor.
