MISHOU QUESTIONS ORTIZ ON BORDER SECURITY BILL

By Ed Mishou
U.S. veteran and
Libertarian candidate for Congress

Living as I do within a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande along Military Highway, I was looking forward to get an update from our congressman Solomon Ortiz on our plans for border security.
I had read accounts about a proposed $721 million in personnel and technology to keep our borders secure in local newspapers, largely as a result of reading stories based on Ortiz’s press releases.
However, much to my surprise, what I received in the mail courtesy of our tax dollars and his franking privileges was not the usual update on the subject we as constituents are accustomed to receive. Instead, I found myself (and you, too, if you live in his district) holding a glossy campaign mailout advertisement featuring Ortiz as the leader in the struggle to rescue the funds from a callous Congress.
In the update/ad, Ortiz congratulates himself for leading the charge to reinsert the $721 into an appropriations bill after the rest of the House of Representatives had removed it. For those who wouldn’t know any better, it would seem like he was the champion of our security. But knowing for a fact that his name didn’t even appear with the rest of the South Texas delegation on the request to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the reinsertion, I found this deliberate misinformation insulting and, at best, misleading.
This is about par for a man who has been in Congress for 28 years and term in and term out he comes down to the Valley to inflate his achievements not only for the constituency at large, but specifically for the veterans of South Texas.
Yet, for all his political prowess, South Texas does not have a Veterans’ Affairs (VA) hospital. The closest VA hospital is in San Antonio, a long drive for many veterans.
In 2007, a comprehensive consultant’s study by Booz Allen Hamilton on South Texas veterans’ health care found that about 98 percent of South Texas veterans traveling to the VA hospital in San Antonio for specialty care. The study also found that the Rio Grande Valley has about 45,000 veterans, with only about 15,000 enrolled for VA benefits.
Where are the efforts to bring the benefits other veterans in other parts of the country already enjoy to our South Texas veterans? Is it about holding yet another Ortiz campaign rally masquerading as a veterans fair at election time?
As a former combat aviator in the Air Force, I am acquainted with the tremendous patriotism of people in South Texas and their enormous contributions to our nation’s defense in all wars. That is why I find Ortiz’s political shell game deeply offensive. In the Rio Grande Valley, our neighbors’ children, fathers, mothers, and friends have paid the price and served our nation. They deserve our deepest respect, not a campaign flyer at taxpayer expense for his reelection.
Our sons and daughters should not risk their lives so this man can make political hay at election time. When they return – and I pray that all of them will return – the least that they can expect is that their representative in Congress will not make the issue of national security veterans health care just another political campaign issue.
The Senate has not yet decided whether to approve the $721 million for the security of our southern border. When and if they do, it’ll certainly be appreciated by those of us that live along this volatile section of our country.
Meanwhile, I urge all of us to look past the political noise generated by our incumbent congressman and ask: Is this really the kind of political and moral representation really what we want in Washington?