What’s broken: We keep acting like fifty small countries in a trench coat instead of one nation. States treat the union as a zero-sum contest — my delegation wins, yours pays — and the country as a whole loses every round.
You want it concrete? Last July, after years of lobbying by one state’s tomato growers, the federal government terminated the U.S.–Mexico Tomato Suspension Agreement and slapped a 17% duty on Mexican tomatoes. One state’s industry won the round. You know who paid? Nogales — where most of those tomatoes cross — and every Arizona family’s grocery bill. Arizona State University researchers projected consumer tomato prices rising as much as 40–85%. Billions in economic activity and tens of thousands of border-trade jobs in Arizona and Texas were put at risk so one state’s industry could win a round. That’s not trade policy. That’s fiefdom politics, and Arizona was the collateral.
And it’s about to matter more, not less. On July 1 — two days ago, as I write this — the United States declined to renew the USMCA, the trade agreement that governs our entire relationship with Mexico and Canada. The agreement is still in force, but it now faces annual reviews and a decade of uncertainty. Mexico is Arizona’s largest trading partner. Whatever happens next in that negotiation, Arizona feels it first — before Florida, before Ohio, before almost anyone. Which means Arizona’s representatives need to be in that conversation, loudly, not waiting for someone else’s delegation to decide our border economy’s future.
A member of the House doesn’t just represent a district inside the country. On trade, on the border, on water — they represent Arizona to the world. I intend to act like it.
What I’d push for:
I spent two years fixing computers from Nogales to Douglas, listening to produce importers worry about a bad grape crop across the border. I didn’t need a briefing book to learn that Arizona and Mexico share an economy. I needed a screwdriver and the patience to listen.