S. Texas Democrat Vela to retire in 2022
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Filemón Vela, a South Texas Democrat, announced on Monday that he will not seek re-election in 2022, saying that after his fifth term in Congress is up, he believes it will be time for someone new to fill the seat.
“It is now time to allow other residents of South Texas the opportunity to fulfill this wonderful privilege for which I will be forever grateful,” Vela said in a statement Monday.
Vela’s retirement comes as Republicans target his and other South Texas districts after GOP candidates and former President Donald Trump had a stronger than expected showing there in November. Vela, who is vice chair of the Democratic National Committee through 2025, said this year that Democrats have a lot of work to do in Texas — especially in areas of South Texas, including his own district, where he says the party’s messaging on energy and guns cost its candidates support in November.
Vela said then that he wanted to be “the voice of caution, reason and taking the middle ground” as the party seeks to hold power through the 2022 midterms and beyond.
In a statement announcing his retirement, Vela said: “I will continue to focus on maintaining a Democratic House and Senate Majority in my capacity as a member of Congress and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, while working diligently for the people I am so grateful to represent.”
Republicans were celebrating the announcement on Monday as Vela became the second House Democrat this month to say he or she won’t seek re-election, following U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona.
“House Democrats are on the run because they know their worsening border crisis and socialist policy agenda will cost them their majority,” said Calvin Moore, a spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP’S House campaign arm. “Expect more Democrats to follow Kirkpatrick and Vela into an early retirement rather than face defeat in 2022.”
Vela won re-election for his fifth term by more than 13 percentage points in November — a wide margin that was nonetheless the closest contest with a Republican contender he had faced.
In a January interview with Hearst Newspapers, Vela pointed to parts of his own district, which stretches from Brownsville to just south of Luling, as evidence of the problem at hand for Democrats in that region. Trump flipped a trio of South Texas counties in Vela’s district that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, including Jim Wells County, a longtime Democratic stronghold where Trump won nearly 55 percent of the vote.
“There were some surprises down-ballot in South Texas, on the border and in rural counties with significant Hispanic populations,” Vela said. “We have to wrap our arms around that.”
In the final weeks of the election, the Texas GOP raised alarms about Joe Biden’s plan to phase out fossil fuels in a state where 162,000 people were directly employed in oil drilling and related services.
“Clearly, the DNC has work to do in Texas,” Vela said in January. “You can’t just tell people like that — we’re going to take your jobs away — and think they’re going to vote for you. If we’re serious about climate change and job creation, we have to be able to tell those individuals and those families, you know what, we’ve got alternatives.”