By the end of the night, efforts to withhold those payments were quashed.īut during a hearing on Capitol Hill, Conaway, who leads the Republicans in the committee, gave remarks calling Democrats “shameful” for bringing any doubt that the subsidies would be dispersed. The next day, he spent close to 10 hours fielding calls from worried Texas farmers. “Why would we do something stupid like that?” Vela responded. Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota who chairs the Agriculture Committee, telling him other Democrats were threatening to withhold payments to farmers affected by tariffs. The previous weekend, Vela had begun a 28-hour drive from Brownsville to Washington when he got a call from U.S. Conaway and Vela tussled over an otherwise uncontroversial issue: subsidies for farmers, which in the end both members agreed should be disbursed. The two Texans serve together on the House Agriculture Committee, one of the few remaining places in Congress where bipartisanship is the norm. His latest dustup came in September with U.S. “I would say I was more straight-forward,” he said, rebuking the wording in a Tribune story describing his comments as “less-than-diplomatic.” Quiet voices don’t often get heard in Congress, especially not now. To him, each statement has been completely warranted. In September, he called a Republican colleague “a racist Christian pretender who led the effort to starve America’s poor.” Two months earlier, he called for the firing of the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, saying the organization was in “complete chaos.” Since then, he has made news for firing verbal bullets toward both sides of the aisle. As much of Washington has come to realize since, Vela knows how to make a scene. At the time, Vela was known as a mild-mannered, perhaps even centrist, representative. Filemon Vela, a Brownsville Democrat, when Donald Trump was still running for president. Only one, however, has told him to “take your border wall and shove it up your ass.” WASHINGTON - Many members of Congress disagree with the president’s approach to border security. Filemon Vela is willing to tussle with colleagues from both parties” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans - and engages with them - about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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