Gov. Greg Abbott still hasn’t scheduled a special election to fill the vacant seat for San Antonio’s 23rd Congressional District, leaving the area unrepresented as it emerges as ground zero in the screwworm crisis.
The district’s U.S. House seat has been vacant for 60 days since the resignation of scandal-plagued Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales.
The first case of the parasitic New World Screwworm was detected June 3 in a three-week-old calf in La Pryor, a town in the 23rd. The district stretches from San Antonio to El Paso and encompasses 800,000 residents.
Although once eradicated in the United States, the return of flesh-eating New World Screwworm larvae could wreak havoc on the state’s $15.5 billion livestock industry, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture.
The 23rd District alone pulled in $450 million in cattle and calf sales in 2022 — the fourth most of any Texas congressional district — according to USDA data.
Gonzales resigned on April 14 after admitting he’d had an affair with a staffer who later took her own life. Nonetheless, Abbott still hasn’t scheduled a special election to fill the position and hasn’t explained his delay in calling one.
While in office, Gonzales led the introduction of anti-screwworm legislation in the House. The legislation, which had bipartisan support and was consponsored by a majority of the Texas delegation, was intended to establish facilities to grow sterile flies in areas at risk of infection. However, the bill never saw the House floor. Gonzales also launched a screwworm working group with federal personnel, state stakeholders and ranchers.
Despite the risks, Democrats argue Abbott is motivated to leave the seat open out of political calculus.
“Greg Abbott is leaving TX-23 vacant because he knows Democrats could win it in a special election,” Houston U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday. “He has no shame.”
Menefee won a May runoff against veteran legislator and civil-rights firebrand U.S. Rep. Al Green for a redistricted seat after the 18th Congressional District went 334 days without a representative. At the time, Democrats accused Abbott of keeping the seat vacant to preserve the slim Republican majority margin in the House.
Menefee has since filed legislation requiring governors to move more quickly to fill empty congressional seats.
Republican Brandon “AK Guy” Herrera, a YouTube gun influencer, and Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, an attorney, are running in the Nov. 3 general election to replace Gonzales in TX-23. However, the winner won’t be sworn into Congress until January, meaning the seat would go vacant for more than 265 days.
“I believe leaving 800,000 constituents without representation is an emergency,” Padilla Stout said in an interview with the Chronicle.
Regarding the screwworm crisis, Herrera tweeted Monday that “the time to act was years ago.” Two of the four confirmed cases as of press time are in TX-23.
“This is something that ranchers in the district have been screaming from the rooftops since last year,” Herrera also told the Texas Tribune.
The USDA broke ground on a sterile fly facility in the South Texas town of Edinburg in April, an event attended by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, both Republicans. The site, located in Congressional District 15, isn’t yet operational. However, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has pledged to fast-track its launch.
Both Padilla Stout and Herrera have expressed alarm over the screwworm crisis and have met with both ranchers and federal officials on the issue. However, both indicated that their abilities to effect change are limited since they’re candidates and not yet elected officials.
“If this isn’t cause for calling a special election, I don’t know what is,” Stout told the Tribune.
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