A Texas Republican Exits the House

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2019

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

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Border Patrol is underfunded relative to the area it covers, and the technology in use for border security is both out of date and overly complicated, “requiring a Ph.D. in computer science to operate,” he says.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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:11.0	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
0:22.3	their days and march to demand action from government leaders on climate change. With every
0:28.3	record-setting heat wave, with every extreme storm, it's harder to deny the reality. Climate
0:34.4	change is here, right now, and it's already causing us urgent problems.
0:40.3	Two of our contributors have been sounding the alarm for decades.
0:44.1	Bill McKibben essentially broke the news of climate change
0:47.1	to a wider public with his book The End of Nature,
0:50.5	and that work was first published in The New Yorker in 1989,
0:53.9	and staff writer Elizabeth Colbert, who covers climate change for the New Yorker,
0:58.4	wrote The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
1:02.5	We spoke earlier this year just after the UN published a report
1:05.8	that one million species are at risk of extinction.
1:11.1	Betsy, I hate to be a competitive journalist,
1:13.4	but when I read the report about the sixth extinction and the UN report,
1:17.9	I said the New Yorker had that 10 years ago when you published in 2009,
1:22.5	the very same thing.
1:24.4	What is the difference between 2009 and 2019 in terms of the extinction of
1:30.6	hundreds of thousands of species on the planet Earth?
1:35.7	Well, I think that, I mean, it's one of those cases where, you know, as I'm sure Bill
1:43.5	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, ten years ago.
2:02.4	But, you know, the general trend line of biodiversity lost, it's all just playing out, you know,
	...

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