EXCLUSIVE: Woodlands Congressman Dan Crenshaw discusses his hopes and expectations for the new legislative session

THE WOODLANDS, TX – Congressional District 2 Representative Dan Crenshaw, whose jurisdiction now includes The Woodlands area, recently sat down with Woodlands Online for a brief, exclusive interview.

What are the differences between the ‘old’ District 2 that you had previously represented and the ‘new’ District 2 – formerly District 8 under Congressman Brady, both geographically and culturally?

Montgomery County is the big difference. Old District 2 was all in Harris County; the redistricting basically cuts Montgomery County in half and I have the east side, including The Woodlands. Culturally, everybody is still a Texan; while my new district is more rural than my previous one.

What do you hope to accomplish in the 118th Congressional Session, now that your party holds the majority in the House?

In regards to legislative accomplishments for the 118th Congressional session, we’ve got to get the border taken care of. We’re going to pass a great border bill and it’ll go nowhere; much like we passed the bill to defund 87,000 IRS agents, it'll go nowhere also, because of the Senate.

To some extent, we’re going to have to virtue signal; we have to say what we’re for. And though it is useless because, as I said, it won’t go through the Senate. So then we’re going to have to do the hard work and go to Democrats to ask them, ‘What will you vote for to fix the border? How far will you go, and how far can we push you?’ That’s a big goal for these next two years. It’ll be the same conversation whether it’s for the border, for energy, healthcare, all of it. There’s a lot of bipartisan stuff we can do to reduce prices on healthcare, I think. The Democrats still have completely different philosophies over healthcare than we do, but those are issues that I work on.

I’m really pushing hard to get the Democrats to agree with me that the cartels are at war with us, and that we have to respond to the Mexican cartels that are facilitating the immigration crisis and the fentanyl crisis that are killing tens of thousands of people.

I look to things that we can look to Democrats to give support on, because otherwise it’s not going anywhere. But we need to continue to pass bills that state our stances. There is value to doing that; but every time we do that, we need to also be doing something that’s productive. That’s what I’m going to push the House Leadership for.

This reporter remembers the ‘good old days’ of the two major parties reaching across the aisle; nowadays it seems that ‘bipartisanship’ is a dirty word on both sides. How do we overcome that?

By just talking. There’s no quick answer or secret ingredient. You just have to make friends and talk and deal with the backlash. Do you know what we could have done last week? We did a lot of virtue-signaling bills, but what we could have done was a bill that I’ve already written that gives border patrol agents hazardous duty pay for when they’re on assignment at the southern border. I wrote this to help their morale a little bit, and I know that Democrats would vote for that and President Biden would sign it.

I want to make sure that our response for the possibility of not signing this bill isn’t, ‘Well, we don’t want Biden to have a victory.’ That would really piss me off. We’ve got to help the people. If what we do helps the people but hurts our politics, then we should still do it. That’s a principle we should live by.