Will Hurd is the bipartisan voice we need

After six years in Congress and nine years in covert intelligence and national and cyber security, Will Hurd is a bipartisan spirit with a message for how to make a change.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. And we are beginning a new series on Good God called good politics because this is a time when we really need good politics. And to kick off our series, I'm thrilled to be able to welcome to the program Congressman Will Hurd. Will is no longer in the Congress. He finished his term from 2015 to 2021 just in January and he's continuing to be politically active. But after about a nine year stint in covert intelligence, operations, learning about cybersecurity and national security and all those things he took his talents to Washington and has a reputation for being a real bipartisan spirit. Will, we can't thank you more for being with us and sharing some of your insights with us on Good God.

Will Hurd:
Well, it's a pleasure to be with you and we definitely need good politics. So I'm on board with your concept on what you're trying to do.

George Mason:
Terrific. So let's just begin with the whole concept of politics. Of course, it's really how we live together, how we negotiate public space and private lives and where those boundaries and all of that are. But a lot of politics I think boils down to when we get involved in it, is a vision of what society ought to look like, what within the bounds of our constitution, nonetheless, there's a moral imagination that goes into making up how we are motivated to act. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you view politics through that lens, where does that moral imagination come from for you and what are some of the values that are guiding principles for you.

Will Hurd:
Sure. I went to Texas A&M University and my degree is in Computer Science and I was involved in a student organization. We put on about a thousand programs a year and we had a budget about $6 million and I ran this and it was like a business, pretty decent business. And we were reorganizing the entity and we had some consultants come in and they gave me this framework vision process structure. If you aren't able to articulate clearly what the vision of where you want to go, you're never going to get there. And then how do you put processes in place in order to get to that vision. And then what is the structure that is needed to enforce that process. And so to your question about vision and what should our government be doing.

Will Hurd:
What is the ideal version of ourselves as individuals and ideal version of our government. And I think it starts with, go to the preamble of our constitution, establish justice. What does that mean. And to me it's how do you help the greatest number of people possible. And let's start there. And so I also look at the objective, what are you trying to do. Sometimes we get caught up in a particular solution versus talking about what are we trying to achieve. And healthcare is a good example. We always talk about whether it's the ACA or Obamacare or something else. No the goal, the objective what we should be trying to achieve is a healthcare system that increases access to and decreases cost of healthcare. And so sometimes we forget that.

Will Hurd:
And so that's how I've always come across and to try to solve problems, is how do you maximize the benefit to the greatest number of people possible and how do you help those that need help. And that's something that I saw at a granular level in Congress. For me, the things I will remember about my time in Congress is not legislation and speeches on the floor. It's helping that one individual, that 76 year old woman who had lost her husband, who was a veteran, they were getting VA benefits and VA messed something up and she wasn't getting those benefits and she was about to get evicted from her house. We solve that problem. So I'm babbling a little bit here, George but to me help them raise somebody who will possible and help those that need the most help.

George Mason:
So let's just talk a little more about following up on that. So the truth of the matter is that particular person that you helped in that way is something that yes you can do in government. And you can connect to the agencies and systems that will achieve that. There's a certain amount of one by one help that churches and faith communities and nonprofits can also do. But when you get to some of these big, nasty, wicked challenges like healthcare and immigration and things of that nature, you're dealing now with big policy issues that can actually, instead of having to cherry pick this one and this one and this one, if had systems that actually were working for people that would be helpful.

George Mason:
But this gets to the point of a lot of this conversation, I think Will. And that is it seems that sometimes ideologically, our partisanship has such divergent views of how to achieve these very pragmatic ends that you just described. That it's actually in the interest of the parties not to achieve a compromise and not to define the solution and because to do so would run counter to the banks and you would lose power of reelection and fundraising and all those things. How do we deal with that brokenness.

Will Hurd:
Sure. So you ID a lot of issues and to start with your first point, what I learned is when I was able to solve a problem for one person, I figured out how to solve it for thousands of people. And so that gave you the understanding of the minutiae that was getting in the way and then you pass legislation in order to do it so that other people don't deal with that. So that's one tactic. But let's take an issue like immigration, specifically let's say DACA, Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival. These are young men and women that have only known the United States of America as their home. They were brought here illegally, no fault of their own. This is an issue that when you poll voters, even Republican primary voters, a super majority over 70% believe that the young men and women that are in this DACA category should have a permanent legislative fix to their predicament.

Will Hurd:
So why can't we get anything done? Both sides would like to use this issue of immigration as a political bludgeon against the other. And that is because in the house of representatives last election about 92% of the seats were decided in a primary. Primary voters are anywhere between 25 and 57,000 votes, general election voters are north of 175,000 to 375,000. So when you have most of the seats being decided in the primary, the most vocal or what would be considered the exits or the extremes, and that's in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party. And so I would say majority of Americans don't believe that fixing DACA is amnesty and most Republicans don't think that and would say most Democrats don't believe in defunding the police or defunding arrays. These are the two narratives that come out that generate and reflect the individual parties. And then nuance is lost because if somebody comes out with a nuanced position, a lot of the electorate is expecting a firm, deep, full throated rebuke of the other extremist position.

Will Hurd:
How do we get beyond this? We need folks at all levels of society not just government. We need civil society, we need church folk, we need folks that may not watch cable news all the time to recognize why do these issues matter. Ultimately, immigration is about ensuring our economy is able to work and function to allow us to continue and to grow this quality of life that we have achieved. We are the pinnacle in the world. And so this solution is complicated. You got to address the root causes of illegal immigration which is violence, lack of economic opportunity and poverty in the Northern Triangle. When people are in our custody, we got to treat them like human beings and we got to show them the dignity and respect that other human beings deserve.

Will Hurd:
And we need to fix our legal system. We can't let people abuse the system. And then we need to fix legal immigration. In this day and age, we should be able to say, hey, this industry in this state needs this many workers, we should be able to be flexible. And so that we're importing the folks that we need. And a lot of times there has always been a nativist perspective within America. The ire of that nativism has changed over the history of our country but we need to stand up and say, this is why this is important. And so that's a long winded answer. It's complicated and you're not going to be able to put an answer to these intractable problems in 280 characters on Twitter. But it also requires responsible citizens demanding this kind of rewarding. The behavior from people that they want to see continue.

George Mason:
But let's go back to what you said almost at the beginning. And that is that it's about primaries. So if you're going to break through this, you can have all the Will Hurds in the world who were being sensible and we don't have many of them right now, it seems that have the courage as you have had famously to have been during a very divisive time seeking to reach across the aisle you and Beto O'Rourke of course, famously on your car trip and all that sort of thing. But I think that the districting problem that we have and the gerrymandering that is true, not just in Texas but everywhere in the United States is what's creating this situation. Where all these elections are being decided by the primaries because every buddy's district is pretty much safe after they get elected.

George Mason:
And so how do we begin as a person of faith, and this is Good God, so we're bringing our spiritual values to this for people to live in a certain area and not to feel that they are actually represented is an insult to their human dignity. It's one of the reasons why we have a country to begin with. And yet, now we have a situation where we are not dealing with enemies that we create a country for democracy to flourish. But now we have a problem of democracy within that we can't get real representation. Will, in my district in Dallas which only barely touches on my neighborhood and goes all the way into East Texas. My Congressman has absolutely no interest in bipartisanship. And there's no way I can even get his attention because he's elected by 92% every single time. So he only plays to his base and this has been true for a long time. So I think we're coming up this October in Texas on probably a redistricting thing. What is the prospect of us breaking through this so that we can have a more robust democracy.

Will Hurd:
The prospect is low for the change that you're expecting. If I'm just being frank and let me couch the problem even more specific. The problem is actually one party rule. Texas and California are the mirror images of each other but you have one party ruling those states. When you go back in our history and look at all legislation or things that have been done of any consequence it's been done in a bipartisan way. The only way we saw big problems is by doing it together, history has taught us that. Now, if I had a magic wand, what I would do, and he used the phrase gerrymander, you have to have a design principle to districts. Is it space, is it people, is it voters to meet the designing principle of our districts should be competitiveness and design as many districts as you possibly can to be close to 50 50.

Will Hurd:
50% Democrat 50% Republican. Now I can get even more specific where you don't want a district to be more than plus or minus six of one party that makes the competition in November where the races. So I got rewarded in my old district of 23rd because if every Republican voted for me in the general election, I would still lose. I had to have independence, I had to have Democrats. So the motivation with it for a district like mine and for competitive districts is to actually be bipartisan which means solving real problems. This is what most people want. Now, we're not going to see often the state legislatures come to this, be divinely inspired and do the thing that we all would wish they would do.

Will Hurd:
But here's the reality primaries, we can get more people to vote in primaries. So I use Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez as an example up in New York. She's probably one of the most famous Democrats in the country. She won her first election in the primary, the only 25,000 people voted in that primary. She got 15,000 votes. She only won by 5,000 votes. When I was student body president at Texas A&M, I think I got 11,000 votes. And so those are the numbers. And when you look at people that vote in general elections, that don't vote, and some of these primaries that delta is pretty significant. So the question is those people that vote in general election, but don't vote in primaries, why do they not vote?

Will Hurd:
And understanding that and appealing to that and that's where advocacy of people that are frustrated. This is going to happen in Texas, in March, we're a year away from the real election which is the primary election. Now the state may get pushed back because of the fact that the census results have been delayed a few months but historically our primaries are in March. So while I don't think that the tectonic change that's required by the state legislatures is going to happen. Individuals that are frustrated with the process can do something. Now it's hard. The most likely indicator of future behavior is past behavior. And so if you don't vote in primaries, you're unlikely to vote in a primary in the future.

Will Hurd:
But I believe that I was at, and I'll end this answer with this story, George. I was at a South by Southwest a few years ago conference talking about, I was with a bunch of YouTube stars. At the time I only had 100 followers on my YouTube account, if that, the rest of them, the other four I was on the stage with had over a billion. And one of them was the digital director for The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. And this was at a time when the movie Moana was coming out, the cartoon. And she said, if Moana fails at the Box Office, are we going to blame moviegoers for not going into the movie or are we going to say the movie was a crummy movie.

Will Hurd:
Now I've seen Moana I think it's actually quite delightful movie. It had good success at the movies she said, but in politics it's the only industry where we blame the person making the purchasing decision and saying you didn't go out and make a purchase. Now I would suggest that a product has not been provided that those people won and I think that is where things can ultimately change and make sure that we're getting more people involved in primaries which lessens the extremist edge of those parties. But it's hard.

George Mason:
Okay. So we've got work to do at the primary level since it's going to be difficult to deal with the redistricting in the short term so that helps and we can motivate people to that end. You made an interesting last statement there about extremism. And I wonder if we could talk about that just a little bit at this point too because it does seem that all of the ways in which we are operating today are moving away from the center and are pulling us apart rather than putting us together.

George Mason:
And I find it ironic that you, to be honest are making this claim because having spent so much time in the intelligence world where it does seem that you're always dealing with threat assessments with enemies and with risks and those sorts of things. Yet there's enough nuance in you to bring us back and not just push us to the extreme. How do you teach people that extremism ideologically, even in and in our advocacy is going to keep tearing the social fabric apart instead of putting it together. How do you help convince people that there is a place here of the common good that we can be searching for, that's worth compromising for and worth aiming toward.

Will Hurd:
So if I knew the winning formula I would be a very successful person. So what I have learned from all my experiences from growing up as a biracial kid in South Texas in the 80s and 90s, to go on to Texas A&M and dealing with a tragedy that the university had never seen before, my experiences overseas recruiting spies and stealing secrets and preventing terrorists from blowing things up and putting nuclear weapons proliferators out of jail and then being in Congress way more unites us than divides us. I've seen it, I've lived it. I don't consume social media and cable news regularly. It's not an indication of the majority of the country but when I interact with people and see people from all walks of life and having done that for almost a decade, you realize that people care about, I don't care where you from, I don't care what your background is, I don't care what you do, I don't care what your socio-economic status is, I don't care where your family's from.

Will Hurd:
You want to put food on your table, a roof over your family's head and make sure that people that you love are healthy and happy. And if we talk about those things, that's how we can start uniting people. Now, how do you teach people that we're being pulled apart at the scenes. There's an even bigger problem at play here. We are preventing, our politics are getting in away from us addressing some of the generational defining challenges our country's faced with. Prior to the pandemic 40% of Americans couldn't handle an emergency expense of over $400. We've seen hate crimes are on the rise especially right now against our brothers and sisters in the Asian community.

Will Hurd:
We have a near-peer adversary, the Communist Party of China that is trying to surpass the United States as a sole hedge of mine. And I'm very specific, I'm talking about the Chinese government, I'm not talking about the Chinese people, I'm definitely not talking about Chinese-Americans or our brothers and sisters, I just said what they're dealing with. But the Chinese government, it's their words this is not my interpretation, it's what they've written themselves. They are trying surpass the United States as a sole superpower. And they're doing it by global leadership and advanced technologies. So if we don't get our act together in the 475 AD, when a Roman was chilling in Rome, did they think the next year that the Western Roman Empire would fall? Most of those people probably didn't even know what a gulf was and the gulf came in and cause Pax Romana to come crumbling down.

Will Hurd:
And so this is the stakes. Now, how do you get people to realize that? I think there are some that are unaware, they can be educated. Others, the only way they're going to learn is if they see a better way that works. If you see more people getting elected the way I got elected, then more people would try that. The professional political class, they know how to talk to what's called the four of four primary vote, somebody who's voted in for the last four Republican primary and it's with some of the more extremist positions. So the system is perpetuating that because it has worked in the past.

Will Hurd:
However, one of the problems we've seen in our foreign policy and we've seen in other countries, people oftentimes fight the war of the past rather than preparing for the war of the future. And I think there's a real opportunity and so I think people are frustrated, I think people want to believe in something larger than themselves, I think the faith that people have, and not only in God but in folks that are responsible in their business or in their government or in their state, they want to see them, they want to believe in something bigger than themselves. And I think when that's provided people will respond. I just don't know if it's been provided.

George Mason:
Well, we're finding ourselves in a position right now where we're looking for hope. And I think there's a lot of despair going on right now because we lurched back and forth left and right in recent times nationally to some extent at the state level but now we are seeing efforts to expand voting access and to limit voting access. We're actually seeing people get into the game but instead of finding a way to sit at a table and say let's agree that we need voter security but let's also agree that we need the greatest possible access to voting and we want the most robust activity, instead it's just count the votes and see how you can win your position. It seems almost hopeless.

George Mason:
So in this final minute or two here that we have together Will, and thank you again for your time, if we can't vote and if we can't vote securely, we can't have a robust democracy. So this may be one of the most important issues that every state is addressing right now or most states, at least. What counsel do you give to people of goodwill to advocate right now in a way that has some hope of success. Because if we closed down voting boosts and voting access in the name of security or if we create opportunity for fraud in either direction, we've got problems. So how do we address that most fundamental problem to begin

Will Hurd:
If elected officials across the states would at least, let's start with Texas because I have the data from Texas. Would they actually listen to the people, Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly like an 80% say, make sure you know who's voting and increase opportunities to vote. This isn't hard in this day and age, if Estonia can vote online and they're literally being hacked on a daily basis by the Russian government, we should be able to determine this is well heard and I can go into vote. If I could use my credit card anywhere in the world securely, we should be able to do this. So 2020 was the most secure election in the United States of America period, full stop. Yes, we should make sure we know who somebody is. That's not hard we've been doing it. And we should increase access.

Will Hurd:
If a county wants to vote 24/7, let them vote 24/7. And so what people need to do is make their opinion be known and say, hey, I believe, what's funny is the people that had been injustly criticized in my opinion are good Americans that are doing this because they want to help their country. It's your neighbor, it's the person you work with that are the folks that are being voting judges and precinct captains and election commissioners that run this in the county is your neighbor. And to think that there's some conspiracy that could be kept secret.

Will Hurd:
To me, it's odd. And what I can say is having seen this, having been involved in this from a 30,000 foot view from the Homeland Security Committee in Congress, our voting system, our tallying systems are secure and strong. I think right now, 98% of our voting systems across the country which is 10,000 different precincts, have a backup system that can be auditable. And so we can't continue this notion that our system is insecure because that's going to erode trust. And by the way, you know who's also promoting that issue, is the Russians. The Russians are trying to erode trust in our systems. And when we do it ourselves, we're helping them.

George Mason:
Well, and in Texas the Attorney General spent in his office, 22,000 hours of investigative time to find voter fraud in the 2020 election. And they came up with, wait for it, 16 false addresses on registration cards. And yet we have all of these efforts to secure elections that were, as you said, historically, as secure as they've ever been or more. So really the issue is something else. But in this time, I think the point is not to say Democrats good, Republicans bad, Republicans good, Democrats bad. How about democracy good. Let's figure out a way to say democracy good. Politics can be noble, not just dirty and partisan.

Will Hurd:
100%. And guess what, you're not going to agree 100% of the time. I'm not married but not all my friends that are, they don't agree with their spouse 100% of the time, I don't agree with my best friends 100% of the time, it's okay, we shouldn't. But we can disagree without being disagreeable. And you shouldn't put on blinders, I love the San Antonio Spurs, I do. But if LeBron James makes a good jump shot, I could say that was a good jump shot. It's okay. I'm not denigrating my home team. And so we can't just claw to our own Jersey and assume that the other side is terrible in trying to run this country into the ground because they're not.

Will Hurd:
They're not. But we as individuals and the folks listening to this and the people in your congregation, we have to model the behavior we want to see. Do you like that stuff on social media from somebody who's doing something really nice or doing something that you like or are you just criticizing the other side. Model the behavior we want to see and if we do that, we can try changing to the situation that we're in.

George Mason:
Well, heard more of you, more of you, we'd like to hear more of Will Hurd. So thank you so much for your time. We're grateful for your servants and we're all looking curiously to see what's next for Will.

Will Hurd:
Well, I appreciate you, George. And you all just have followed me on Will Hurd that's my handle on all my social media.

George Mason:
Very good. We sure will.

Will Hurd:
Okay brother.

George Mason:
Thanks for being in Good God and good politics.

Will Hurd:
Thank you. God bless you.

George Mason:
Take care.

Will Hurd:
Bye-bye

Speaker 1:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2021 by Faith Commons.