Puerto Rico’s Gonzalez-colon has loneliest job in Congress
She represents more Americans than any House member, but she still can’t vote
WASHINGTON» In Congress, you have to know your place. Alliances matter, and traditions are as tough as weeds.
Not that Jenniffer Gonzalezcolon, Puerto Rico’s lone voice in Washington, needs reminding.
As the island’s resident commissioner, she isn’t a fullfledged member of Congress — not quite. She can introduce bills, vote in committee and send out mass mailings on the taxpayers’ dime.
But she can’t vote for legislation on the floor. And there’s another difference, too.
“I don’t think there is any member of Congress here who would be willing to live under a territorial clause that would give their citizens, their constituents, the discriminatory treatment that mine receive, all 3.3 million,” she said.
It is Congress’ loneliest job. Although Gonzalez-colon represents more American citizens than any other House member, she also has the task of teaching colleagues that Puerto Ricans are citizens at all.
That could be changing, after Hurricane Maria thrust the island into the spotlight and an ongoing debt crisis has kept it there.
“If one good thing has come from Maria, it was that the world and members of Congress now know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens; that we have spent 120 years under the American flag and 101 years as U.S. citizens,” she said in an interview in Spanish last month.
Weeks after the September storm, Gonzalez-colon boarded Air Force One for San Juan, where Donald Trump became just the second president in 50 years to visit the island and spent time lobbing rolls of paper towels into the assembled crowd at a church visit.
Then came the congressional trips. Gonzalez-colon, who supports statehood for Puerto Rico, has traveled with dozens of colleagues to the island to survey the relief efforts, most recently with a group of 15 Democrats led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
“It’s different seeing it in real life rather than watching it on TV,” she said.
The first woman to serve as resident commissioner, Gonzalez-colon is also set to become the most visible in decades, as she walks the line between appeasing a volatile president and demanding a more robust disaster response.
If ever there were a time for a nonvoting member to make headway with her colleagues in Congress, now might be it.
Meanwhile, news out of the island this month is grim. Officials quietly acknowledged what many had long suspected — the death toll of the hurricane, on record as 64 people, actually topped 1,400.
With eyes still turned on the unincorporated territory, Gonzalez-colon has redoubled her push for statehood, which she insists is not a pipe dream.
That’s put her in conflict with a few of her House colleagues who are former Puerto Rico residents themselves.
Retiring Democratic Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, who grew up on the island and now represents a Chicago-based district, believes full independence is the only way forward. “In the new America of Donald Trump,” there’s no way the Spanish-speaking commonwealth would be welcomed into the fold as a state, he said. Instead, Puerto Rico should break away and become a republic.
Gonzalez-colon has little patience with that view.
“He does not represent the people of Puerto Rico,” she said of Gutierrez. “The person who represents the people of Puerto Rico in this Congress is me.”
There are several members of the House with Puerto Rican roots, but that doesn’t mean they see eye to eye with Gonzalezcolon, a Republican and a member of Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party.
“It’s very easy for someone … to talk about how Puerto Rico should become a republic while he continues to be a congressman of the United States and has all the protections that a United States citizen has once he buys a Jetblue ticket,” Gonzalez-colon said.
In her view, change is an incremental process.
“It is very easy, from statehood, to ask for Puerto Rico’s independence. It’s a lot harder, as second-class American citizens, to ask for equality in Congress,” she said.
With the midterm elections closing in, no one expects the current Congress to accomplish much before November.
Here again, Gonzalez-colon stands out: As resident commissioner, she is the only person in the House to stick around for four years instead of two. As everyone else thinks about campaigning, she has other things on her mind, such as the new statehood bill she introduced in June.
It’s hardly the first bill to broach the issue. But Gonzalezcolon thinks this one could be different. She’s managed to draw 52 co-sponsors so far from both sides of the aisle, although that number includes all her fellow members without a floor say — the nonvoting delegates from Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.
For starters, she has the support of Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over Puerto Rico.
And hers is the first proposal of its kind to add an extra step toward statehood — a transition from an unincorporated territory to an incorporated one, meaning island residents would pay new taxes without new rights for a time.
Bishop sounded positive but vague when asked about the chances of this latest statehood push. “She is incredibly creative in trying to find a way to move that situation through the hurdles that have been plaguing statehood in decades past,” the congressman said of Gonzalezcolon.
As for the chances of a hearing in September? “We will see,” he said.
If Gonzalez-colon has met with resistance or blank looks in Congress, she’s also getting heat back home.
Gonzalez-colon’s bill relies on the results of a controversial 2017 referendum, in which 97 percent of Puerto Ricans said they wanted statehood.
The problem? Only 23 percent of registered voters went to the polls.