Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, opinion writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, sports, culture and business.

In late 2012, when Charlie Gonzales approached his final weeks in the US House of Representatives.

Then Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called it, quote, the end of an era.

She had good reason to say that Gonzales and his legendary father, Henry Gonzales, had, between them, held the 20th congressional seat of Texas for 51 consecutive years.

Managing to simultaneously embrace his father's legacy and forge his own path.

Gonzales emerged as a strong voice on issues such as immigration, health care and education.

On this episode, he talks about the state of Texas politics, his remarkable family, and how Congress has changed over the years.

Let's get started.

Charlie, thank you so much for being on the show.

my pleasure.

Well, there's so much history I want to get into, but I wanted to start by talking about what happened recently with the Texas primary election.

We saw a Republican governor, Greg Abbott, sink more than $6 million into trying to oust some fellow Republicans from the Texas House who voted against his school voucher plan last year.

And I mean, there were some Republicans who just decided we're not going to run again.

But among the ones that he targeted who were on the ballot, we saw eight who were either defeated or got pushed into runoffs In San Antonio, we saw Steve Ellison, who has been a very strong advocate for public education.

He was defeated in his primary.

What was your big takeaway from from this election?

Too much power in one person.

Obviously, that the governor could do that and with the financial backing.

And of course, money is usually the root of all evil when it comes to politics because how much you can control with the greater amounts of money and just single donors, super PACs.

And to me, money corrupts and you know about power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And I think that's been a demonstration of that.

I've known Governor Abbott for many years when he was attorney general.

I admired him.

I respected him a great deal.

I don't know what happened, but it really was an abuse of the system.

But on one issue, to take everybody out on one issue and you're trying to figure that out, what does that mean?

There must be more to it.

And there is there's an agenda.

But that was.

You feel like some kind of personal this was a vendetta.

This is a big issue.

And you all embarrassed me in some way by not supporting this.

But why would you have that kind of money that he could generate?

And I mean, what was that all about?

And that is scary because you're doing it within your own party.

I mean, this is amazing.

And you know that the speaker now is is a target specifically.

And part of the reason is because a few of the committees in the House are actually run by Democrats, which is the healthiest thing you could do out there.

And there's an old tradition of that, isn't there?

I it's always been that's why it's different from the federal system, which is that's why you have gridlock.

So this is a scary time.

I don't really understand it unless it was some sort of part of an ego trip.

But it's always more than that in politics.

It's not just this one individual that is angry that a bunch of people you embarrassed me.

It's about power.

And we'll see what happens.

And as far as Steve, I've known him for over 40 years.

You're not going to find a more honest, honorable, hardworking individual.

And to take him out on one issue because he goes on a school board and understood what vouchers present in the way of a challenge to the public school system.

Later on, we can get into your time in Congress, and I know that you saw a lot of changes in particularly the Republican Party in the last few years.

We'll get into that.

But I know you're your dad, Henry Gonzalez, and you combined for more than 51 years representing the same San Antonio based congressional district.

And he was once quoted as saying that you were the only one of his eight kids who really shared that interest in politics, that he had.

And one of the things I was curious about was when you were growing up and he had some of these big moments, I mean, the legendary 1957 filibuster on the floor of the Texas Senate, which went on for 36 hours, and he's fighting against these set of segregation bills.

Did he talk to you at that time?

Would he tell you this is what I'm doing and this is why I'm doing it?

Did you have those conversations?

Well, I was blessed because I was just the right age to travel with that to Austin.

He didn't have an apartment.

He drove every day to the state Senate, to the session, didn't realize it, and I just got to go with him.

So now you had back then in Austin Highway wasn't the 35 it is today.

It didn't take all that long, but we had great conversations and it was just an amazing education on a personal basis.

It was the closest ever got to dad, you know, because after that he went to Washington, probably never saw him again.

But we would go.

But I got to witness the filibusters.

So it wasn't just dads.

That one great filibuster against the Jim Crow laws where they were trying to get around, you know, Brown versus board and all that and continue segregation.

I saw him in other filibusters, but dad really was never accepted in those days.

So I saw the discrimination even on the floor of the state Senate and the way he was treated.

I mean.

How did it make you feel when you're watching this?

Well, you know, we've been exposed to it in the 50 years.

And so we're talking about 1956, 57, 58.

Things were not good.

And I mean, you know, the family had been denied access to a park because of a station wagon full of Mexican kids, you know, So it was always there.

And we had when it came to African Americans, you know, my schoolmates couldn't go to me with me to the Majestic Theater and sit in the same audience.

So, I mean, it was it was a way of life in the injustice of it.

And and it was really a crusade.

So I saw my dad is the greatest hero ever.

There were many more like him, though, and those voices were the ones out in the wilderness at that time.

One of my favorite days in San Antonio political history is November 4th, 1961.

This was on that day.

You had Lyndon Johnson, who was then the vice president, United States Cantinflas, and your dad campaigning around San Antonio in this special election race for Congress.

He won that election that day and ended up serving more than 37 years.

Any memories of that day?

Were you?

and do I do I remember it?

Yeah, for a lot of reasons.

Because, you know, I was in high school at that time and I interned, got real quickly through the highlights because dad had run for governor in 58.

He ran he ran for U.S. Senate and a special election to fill Lyndon Johnson seat.

So I traveled with him then, you know, all over the state in the station wagon, you know, that was a lot of fun.

So he ran for Congress.

It was really incredible.

And he really had some great opposition.

And but Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy, this was the first congressional race after the election of John Kennedy.

So they wanted to see what was going to happen.

Speaker Rayburn was in the hospital and declining fast.

This was a big race.

And so they really came in.

There wasn't a big infusion of money in those days.

But Lyndon Johnson was here.

And I'll tell you a story real quick, because you always have to watch it, whether you're my father or anyone else.

So they said former president general and former President Dwight Eisenhower was coming to campaign for the Republican John Good, who I later knew as a lawyer.

And so they asked my dad, what do you think of that?

My father said, I'd rather have Lyndon Johnson alive and kicking than I has been.

Wow.

yeah.

And as soon as he said it, I know what my father thought.

What did I just say?

And this was a cautionary tale to everybody out there about when you're in politics, careful what you say.

So, President Eisenhower comes and they that's the first thing they said, Mr. President, you know, Henry V Gonzales said he'd rather have Lyndon Johnson alive and kicking, rather than a has been.

He says, well, better has been than a never wasn't.

So when I went to high school, I went to class Brother Janson at Central.

I was a big political follower.

And he said, Why did your father say that?

I said, Don't remind me.

We're, you.

Know.

No, but it was it was a heck of a campaign.

And dad did prevail.

But I think when he was elected to the state Senate was really monumental.

The House of Representatives was incredible special legal action.

Things had to fall right in place.

The you know, Congressman Kildee being elevated to a federal court.

Right.

Things like that.

Now, it seemed that there was always a special bond between the Kennedy family and the Gonzales family.

And and your dad was part of that motorcade in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, I think he was five cars behind President Kennedy when he was he was shot in Dallas.

There are stories at the time where your dad is talking about what he experienced, where he's saying, you know, he was at Parkland Hospital.

He saw Jackie Kennedy kiss her husband goodbye, take the ring from her finger, put it on his finger just before they wheeled him out of the hospital.

I think your dad went to Washington right after that.

And I mean, I can't even imagine what a horrifying day it was for him.

And and we all know what we're fine day was for the country.

But one of the things I thought about was, as this story was breaking, how much did did you and the rest of the family know?

Were there moments where you're thinking, you know, our dad knew he may have been hurt and he may have been wounded?

Well, it was obviously before the age of the Internet and cell phones and everything else.

And you basically had CBS, ABC, you know, NBC, and that was it.

And the radio stations.

But the radio stations were real time in those days so you could turn it on.

And so the news hit.

And of course, we were all, you know, in school.

And so in the first thing you thought of, wait a minute, the president was just here.

Dad's in that motorcade, but they didn't say anything else.

So I. I think the mom was real worried.

But Dad's story was just, you know, incredible.

And of course, he was interviewed and he was featured in the book about the assassination.

How long was it before he was able to contact you or let you all know what was going on?

It was the same day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, he had great staff and so the staff was already communicating.

And generally, you know, it wasn't Dad's direct called the mommy would probably be my dad's chief of staff at that time.

Who was his sister.

My great the loose.

And that's where we found out that he was all right.

But dad, you know, said that, you know, they were behind, they heard something and then, you know, obviously the motorcade sped to the hospital and so the rest of the motorcade followed, you know, at that high rate of speed.

And then they got all the congressmen out because people were afraid that it might be a little a bigger conspiracy.

And he went in the hospital and just by chance, he was in that hallway and the first lady was coming out and so on.

And I mean, the getting to the truth of what happened there, I think that that became a big issue for him as the years went on.

Yeah.

That was not Dad's proudest moment.

He really felt and there's a lot to that story, unfortunately, you know, as Dad always wanted a special commission other than what Warren Commission had found, I think Dad believed that there was more and unfortunately there wasn't much support for it.

It had to be done, but it was done in a in a fashion that wasn't sufficiently funded.

And this is another part of it.

And it's very sensitive.

But so suddenly, you know, the African-American members of Congress said, well, why don't we have one for Martin Luther King?

So they kind of combined them.

You were already underfunded, tremendously underfunded.

And the the chief counsel wasn't dad's real choice.

And so it was kind of doomed from the beginning.

Yeah.

And I think dad was very disappointed and eventually just withdrew from the whole committee.

Now, in 1988, you were a district court judge when your dad decided not to run for another term.

And in thinking about this, I mean, you saw the demands of the job of, you know, what he had experienced, how tough this job was and all the, you know, the criticism, the slings and arrows that went with it.

What made you decide he wanted to bless you?

You were following some in some big footsteps as well.

What made you decide you wanted to do that?

Well, it could be temporary insanity right now, because I always wanted to be in the legislative branch.

I ran for Judge.

I forget how many times, five or six times.

It wasn't the same, but it was political.

I was involved politically, and that was important.

I didn't want to go to the state House of Representatives.

State Senate was more attractive, but there were some really good people there.

But Dad's health declined and the opportunity was there.

And I thought this it's now or never.

So I decided to do it, and I resigned from being a judge in order to run and such.

But it was a hell of a primary, I'll tell you that.

Very.

Well.

People forget it was not a picnic or as they say, a cakewalk.

So the demands.

I was already divorced.

I didn't have I only had one son.

I just thought, I'm not going to have the demands of my dad.

You know, I can pull this off.

Not fully appreciating that it was going to be a killer of a job if you do it right.

Yeah, if you do it right.

Now, you had been in office, I think, less than three years when the 911 terrorist attacks happened.

And then a year later, Congress had to decide whether they were going to approve a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, which then President George W Bush was kind of connecting to the war on terror.

And this resolution passed overwhelmingly.

You were one of the people who voted against it.

And I think time has vindicated your vote.

When we look at what happened in the war in Iraq.

I, I guess I'm curious what how tough that was for you to cast a vote, given the political climate at the time, because it was it was a popular decision to go into Iraq at the time.

And also you were representing Military city USA.

That complicates the issue.

What how difficult was it for you to cast their vote?

You know, you would think it was rural, difficult.

I'd been a lawyer and a judge.

And if you came to me, I would ask you to argue the pro and argue the con.

Right, Because that's where I educated myself.

And when we had our hearings and we had secret classified hearings and Condoleezza Rice would get up there and the secretary of defense would get up there.

You know, I'm talking about General Powell and others and I'm talking about Condoleezza Rice, highly respected, incredibly intelligent.

The case they made for weapons of mass destruction did not make sense.

It just did not.

I'm just telling you it did not.

And we had inspectors Hans Blix, I think, was named and we had a resolution that would have authorized the military to go in there to access any and all locations and facilities.

See, that was the answer.

Well, we couldn't get it done.

It was a frenzy.

It was just a frenzy.

You got to remember, you know, 911 changed this world forever.

GANIS Than made sense.

Iraq never really made sense, and it destabilized the whole area.

And to be honest with you, Iraq was always kind of the check on Iran.

So we inherited Iraq and Iran and the trouble with Afghanistan.

Worst decision that was ever made.

But on the evidence itself and what I was able to hear in classified hearings did not meet the burden.

And the alternative would have been better.

We would have had a timeline in six months.

Would we have been invading Iraq?

I'll never know.

But they never gave us a chance to really get out there and inspect those facilities that we thought were manufacturing the chemical weapons and such.

George Time in Congress, you were also chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Immigration was a big issue that you focused on.

And I mean, I look at what I think that's going to be one of the big issues, if not the big issue of the 2024 presidential race.

And it's an issue that continues to vex our political leaders.

What would you see as the essential elements of any solution to when it comes to border policy, immigration policy?

The business community of the United States of America?

The Chamber of Commerce is for comprehensive immigration reform.

Most big, big businesses are and why immigration's necessary.

We use that labor.

We need workforce.

Absolutely.

And if we look out there right now or if you look as to who's on the roof fixing everything and who's doing construction and caregiving and hospitality, we couldn't survive.

And employers have a burden to comply with the law.

And so they have to verify whether someone's documented or not.

There's a huge burden that is placed on us strictly from an economic sense.

You know, we should have comprehensive immigration reform.

We need to do something about the Dreamers.

That's a no brainer.

But the parents and others that have been here for many years, they don't pay taxes.

They don't have criminal records.

They make the economy grow.

What about the asylum system?

Because there's been so much debate about how we handle that.

All of a sudden, it was the only way that you could possibly gain entry.

Right.

And have a legal right to say, I want my case heard you can't deport me because it's asylum.

But Congress has to act.

It's in the it's always been in the hands of Congress.

And even now, as we all know, even the compromise bill that was provided would have been a stopgap effort, but it would have been something.

Right.

And it was something that a lot of Democrats didn't like.

A lot of those provisions.

But I think they were willing to accept it.

But, you know, with President Trump saying you got to knock it out, and I think that is political, all political.

But I think Americans also have to appreciate what the facts on the ground really are in, what is in our own best economic interests.

And you left Congress after 14 years, a couple of years after the big Tea Party wave election of 2010.

We just had so many freshmen Republican members of Congress come in.

What kind of change did you see?

I mean, this is something that I've been kind of fascinated with.

I've read about it and it just felt like it was a very different climate in the House after that.

Well, it had been building for a while, but some people some of the greatest members I ever met were Republicans, you know.

Chairman Leach, Chairman Oxley, there there were incredible.

Even Boehner was really something when you got past his, you know, kind of B.S.

stuff.

But the election of Obama but they had been building the Tea Party was building with the election.

Obama It was a sea change.

It was a reaction to the election of Barack Obama.

I am convinced that that's what it was.

And and then the Tea Party just took over and it was encouraged by even the old style Republicans in order to maintain majorities.

But the old thing about, you know, when you ride on the back of a tiger, you can never get off.

And when they got off, they got eaten up.

And that's what's happened.

And it's tragic.

It really is, because now the parties are so far apart.

But in 2010, there were about 50 something members of the House that were elected on the Republican side, and they were there to bring down Congress, not build it up and make it responsible.

And within a year or so, I knew that was going to be my last term.

Well, I saw a panel discussion that you were part of in 2014 where you talked about the fact that you could see people coming to Congress who didn't really love the institution and didn't really respect the institution.

And and, you know, we're hearing from Republicans in a Republican majority, Congress, people like Chip Roy are saying we haven't accomplished anything.

We're not getting anything done.

Is is that what's happening?

You think that this there's just there are people who are there not because they want to govern, but for other reasons.

It's really strange is like I understand that government can be a real bureaucratic state.

Red tape.

You pay taxes, you're never happy and such.

They just don't believe that the federal government should be responsible for as much as what the federal government is doing.

But it's the only way you can do it.

Otherwise, we go back to the Articles of Confederation, which we tried before the Constitution of the United States of America and a real union.

This is all crazy to me.

I never have understood it.

But they came in with a real agenda.

And they're zealots.

They don't need facts.

They don't need science.

They don't need anything.

It's just you're against this image.

Your idea that they think, you know, it's almost like they demonized the role of legitimate government.

When you when you look at this election cycle, I mean, we're you know, the polls are telling us all kinds of different conflicting things.

What is your sense about the mood of the country and what might happen this year?

You know, the pandemic did not help.

Right.

And I think that accelerated some things.

There's a lot of frustration.

My fear is that today's America really doesn't have a sense of community anymore.

Definitely not a sense of sacrifice or contribution.

We're not meeting our recruiting recruiting numbers in the armed services.

That is really serious, right?

We are a consumer based economy that there's consequences to not being able to manufacture anything that you rely on from raw materials to finish products we just consume.

I understand that you can continue doing that or a certain extent.

We are credit based society.

So as long as you have that credit card and such and you can borrow money, but that can only last so long.

I think we need to get back to some of the fundamentals.

And we like to possess and consume.

And as long as that's the basis of our economy, I think we are in jeopardy.

But the other thing, too, is just how much are you willing to do or sacrifice?

And I used the word sacrifice.

I just mean contribute to your neighborhood association, to your church, to your civic or your social, to your public.

And you've seen that dissipate over time.

yeah.

Radically, Radically.

And, you know, it it takes two people in a household now in order to, quote, survive.

But that's because you have two or three cars.

You know, you have the big screen TVs in every room.

Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't be comfortable, You know, come to my house.

You know, we have too many of these things.

But you still got to give back.

Charlie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Appreciate it.

my pleasure.

Thank you for.

And just thanks for what you do.

That's all for this episode of Texas Tech.

Thanks for watching.

If you have any questions or thoughts that you want to share with us, please email us at Texas, talk at Kayla and dot org.

We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.